Nepenthe
by notmanos
Summary: Marcus comes to L.A., seeking Logan's help in finding a deadly mutant that the Organization is after. But even if they can find the mutant first, do they want to be saved?
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel & Buffy the Vampire Slayer are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his crew are mine - steal them and die!_

_N.B.: Takes place shortly after "X2", and directly after "Reign In Blood"._

_**Nepenthe - **a potion used by the ancients to induce forgetfulness of pain or sorrow; something capable of causing oblivion of grief or suffering._

* * *

NEPENTHE

1

You'd think an undercover assignment at a club called Syn would be a lot more fun than this.

As it was, Bren sat at the chrome bar, Franz Ferdinand pounding his eardrums into submission as neon lights flared and faded, primary colors that stung and bled across faux aluminum and velvet lined walls, as dancers writhed on the dance floor like the tortured damned in hell.

Wow - he really hadn't had enough to drink yet.

This was his second night in a row here, acting as bait for a killer Oghur demon. It had been staking out this club for some reason, always killing and eating the hearts of young men (fun). He struck at least once a week, and had been doing do for four weeks in a row. He hadn't struck yet this week, which had given them hope of finding him first. The problem with an Oghur, as Angel told him, was they were complete chameleons; they could mimic their environment completely, to the point of appearing (and smelling) like anything, including a regular Human being. The one catch was they could only hold a disguise for about thirty minutes at a time, and often relied on their camouflage alone, never doing their homework on who or what they were supposed to be. But homework wasn't necessary when you were only with a person long enough to lure them into an alley and rip their heart out of their chest.

Since young men were the victims (and Giles figured that it was because men's hearts were generally bigger than women's hearts - which was gross if you thought about it; the Oghur was a glutton), he was pretty much declared the perfect bait, and Bren was kind of sad Saddiq was gone. Of course, Sid was so stiff in social situations he would have been an obvious trap.

Logan had come back, and took Sid out to talk one day. Whatever he said to him, Sid decided he needed to go away and think for a while, decide what he wanted to do with his life. Bren asked him about it, and Logan told him that he only told "the kid" (Sid) that he needed to decide what he wanted for himself, and he needed to stop taking care of other people and following orders and just do it. Sid had been looking after the others in his "guard" since he was barely old enough to dress himself, and it hadn't gotten any better; Sid was forever looking after other people. While such adherence to responsibility was heartening, Logan felt that that had trained Sid to ignore his own needs and wants as a matter of course. It was no wonder he was confused about who he was and what he wanted, because other people had always defined it for him. He knew of a beach place that was open near Malibu, not Bob's, but a friend of Bob's, and told Sid to go there and be by himself for a while, doing nothing but thinking and taking care of no one but himself. He gave no one the number where Sid could be reached, and advised that no one ask for it, as they weren't going to get it.

Xavier had actually okayed this, as he thought Logan would probably know Sid pretty well - he didn't go into details on that, but Bren had figured it out for himself. They were both programmed, designed to be killing machines, although Saddiq was made for it before birth; Logan was jammed into the role much later on in life. Which was why Saddiq easily accepted and adapted to his role without question, while Logan seemed a rough and uncomfortable fit. Well, the killing machine thing he could do, but the taking orders part … that was a tougher oar to row, or whatever the hell that expression was. But the Professor seemed to feel that of all people, Saddiq had made a connection with Logan, and certainly Bren knew that Sid admired him, for his physical fighting prowess if nothing else. (There were very few people that could keep up with Sid there, and Logan was on the short list, although even he admitted that to beat Sid in a straight fight, he'd have to permanently cripple or kill him, which wasn't something he ever wanted to do.)

So Sid had followed Logan's order (ironically) to do nothing for a while and try to figure out what he wanted for himself, and Bren found himself imagining Sid sitting stiffly in front of a big bay window looking out on the Pacific, a beautiful scene he couldn't enjoy because nobody told him to do it. That actually made him feel bad for Sid. What would it be like to be a total stranger to yourself?

Which was another thing Logan had in common with Sid, although for totally different reasons.

He told Angel he'd stick to mocktails, because after last night's strangely disappointing and boring "stake out", he'd had a couple of alcoholic drinks, and got a little tipsy. He didn't get drunk, like Angel claimed - not from a beer and a couple of White Russians. Okay, maybe three or four White Russians; and maybe a Metropolitan. They were frou frou cocktails, for gods' sake - how fucked up could you get on them?

Speaking of which, he was done with the apple "mocktinis"; the next time the bald, tattooed, and heavily pierced Latina bartender came by, he asked for a Black Russian. She looked pretty tough, with a platinum nose ring and a black tribal tattoo that covered the left half of her naked scalp, and looked like it probably hurt like a bitch when it was being done. Although he hated to stereotype, he was relatively certain she was a "bull" lesbian, one of those really macho gals that could handily kick the ass of your average man, gay or straight. She didn't wear any make up, but the surprising thing was she actually was kind of pretty. He got the feeling if he mentioned that, she'd smash his head repeatedly into the bar top.

Most clubs were either gay or straight, with maybe a night reserved for the "other" group, but Syn was on the very edge of West Hollywood, and was one of the few clubs that still had a good mix of sexual orientations. Bisexuals felt more comfortable coming here, because it wasn't an "all gay" club, but that did confuse the guise the Oghur must have been taking. It was assumed it was disguising itself as a woman - surely a beautiful one, to get the men to drop their guards so easily - but once Bren explained the nature of the club to them (okay, he'd been here once before - but only to check out a band), they realized this could go either way. A beautiful man or woman could be the Oghur, and they could change the gender of their guise weekly, which would also explain why the cops hadn't progressed very far in their investigation. (So far they seemed to be quietly investigating this as a work of ritualistic killings by a "cult", as they seemed to think different people were responsible.) Luckily, Bren could go either way himself, being bisexual, so he fit in here. But the contacts were starting to kill him. "Breathe with your eyes" his ass.

Because his eyes were always Brachen red, he'd have stood out as a demon (hybrid), and all the victims so far had been Humans, and it was more than likely he/she had a taste for Human hearts alone. So he got himself some colored contacts, "sea green" they were called, and they were far too green to be believed as a natural eye color, but that was okay, as a lot of people wore colored contacts nowadays. He'd counted three separate violet eyed women here tonight, and that was only so far; he was roughly sure the numbers would increase before the club shut for the night. If anything, having patently fake color enhanced eyes probably made him seem that much more Human.

He glanced around the club, a casual and hopeful glance, and he wondered why no one had tried to pick him up. It was starting to really hurt his ego, even if he was waiting for a heart eating monster. Did he look bad? He glanced down at himself, and felt he looked like he fit in. He was wearing shiny black PVC pants, which made him feel like a Britney Spears back up dancer, but was highly popular in the club. He also wore a tight, retro trendy t-shirt (rusty maroon in color, with the phrase "Free'N'Easy" across the front in big, goofy balloon letters, now so broken up with age and repeated washings that it looked more like an ungainly stain than an actual phrase), aware he probably should have gone with a sexier shirt (like many of the club hoppers), but he just didn't feel that good about his body; more specifically, his torso. But how could he? No, he wasn't out of shape, but after seeing the naked chests of Logan, Saddiq, Angel, Matt, and Bob, he was roughly certain he was a pasty, soft, formless and shapeless lump of cold oatmeal. Jesus Christ, how did you _ever_ have a good feeling about your body image, not just your chest, when you were surrounded by guys like that! Greek gods, the lot of them. By comparison, he was a skinny little geek with not so much "six pack" abs as "sack of potatoes" abs. Whereas you could bounce a quarter off Logan's abs, he was certain a quarter would sink into his belly button and get lost. If he had a chest even remotely resembling that chiseled piece of granite, he'd never wear a goddamn shirt. He'd probably also never spend a Saturday night alone again.

After gulping down his Black Russian, he decided to try a Vodka Espresso (just the name was intriguing), and wondered why PVC pants didn't come with a warning: _"Once you start sweating in these - and you will - you will feel slimy and gross, and your underwear will cling to you in uncomfortable ways. Wedgie factor 9.9." _Also, Fall Out Boy started playing, and he was sure this was the exact same music rotation that was playing last night. Would it kill them to pony up the dough and get a decent DJ? Or at least swap out mix tapes a bit more often.

He got the vodka espresso he ordered, but before he could take a sip, someone slid onto the stool beside him, and ordered a sea breeze. Glancing over, he took his first sip and choked. It was a lot stronger and stranger a drink than he anticipated. Also, the guy next to him was the most fucking gorgeous man he'd seen in ages.

He was young - maybe his age, or up to his early twenties - with fine boned features in a face that could only be described as "boyishly handsome", except he had just a hint of ruggedness, enough that he didn't look feminine. His eyes were the most amazing thing about him, though - almond shaped yet a high sky blue, the kind Paul Newman was supposedly famous for. He also had scruffy but sleek black hair, mid-length and messy enough to let you know he didn't fuss with his hair, but also didn't have to, as he just had the genetic luck to be born looking fabulous.

The guy's gorgeous blue eyes widened as Bren continued to choke, and he patted him on the back. "Need the Heimlich?" he asked, somewhat amused.

He shook his head, and finally managed to clear his throat. "Wrong pipe," he rasped, sure he thought he was an idiot.

But the guy just smiled, showing off bright white teeth, and held out his hand. "Kier."

Kier? Oh jeeze, what a Hollywood name that was. He shook his hand, which he noticed was cold. Cold hands, warm heart, right? "Brendan."

"Oh, Irish. We have a bit in common there; my full name's Kieran. But Kier just sounds cooler."

Bren could only nod, feeling himself smiling dumbly. He tried to stop himself, but he wasn't sure he succeeded. Maybe Angel had been right about the booze … "Love the shirt."

Kier was wearing artfully torn jeans, leather biker boots, and a sleeveless black t-shirt that had slashes all over it, a retro-punk kind of look that looked terrific on him. Also, one of the slashes across the chest revealed the colorful marks of a tattoo, something red. He also wore a necklace, a flash of silver with a pendant that looked like a tiny dagger. "Oh, thanks. I made it myself."

"Seriously?"

"Hell yeah. I saw a shirt like this in a boutique on Rodeo, and it was like two hundred bucks. For a torn shirt? That's idiotic. I just bought a plain old Hanes one, and made the slashes myself with a razor blade. I now tell everyone it's a LaCroix, and everybody oohs and aahs over it." He gave him a smart ass smirk, proud and yet slightly sheepish, and Bren couldn't help but smile back.

They ended up talking - well shouting - to one another, and Kier was charming and funny, and just about everything he could want in a guy. So _of course _he had to be the heart chomping maniac; Bren was well aware of how his luck ran. His eyes kept drifting to that tattoo, which was centered just above his heart. Was it a heart tattoo? Maybe that was meant to be funny.

So much for the idea that the Oghur didn't do his homework. Kier was very up on pop culture, and even agreed that the Death Cab For Cutie song that came on while they were finishing their drinks seemed a little too wistful for this place, and not really danceable (The New Year - Bren pretended not to know what the name of it was, even though it popped up about a half dozen times in the song. Then he wondered if that was a lucky guess on Kier's part …)

This was bad; this was _so_ bad. He told himself it was the alcohol, he tried to blame it on that, but he was really starting to like Kier by the time he suggested they get out of there. He definitely had a strong lust on for him, but how could he not? He was the perfectly beautiful lure to a deadly trap, and he hated to think that Angel was going to kill him. But if he was a heart eating, man killing fiend, there was no other solution to it. Oghur's weren't known for their reasonableness; they were simply predators. Just his luck.

They stepped out onto the sidewalk, where Bren took a deep breath of smoggy, warm L.A. air, and hoped it would clear his head. (No.) "So what is it you wanna do?" Bren asked, smiling as though it was a come on, making sure Kier walked ahead of him so he could always keep his eye on him. Oghurs were apparently ugly bastards, and their transformation could be extremely sudden.

"It's gonna sound stupid, but I really wanted some ice cream."

Bren gave him a funny look, and had to squelch the urge to exclaim, _'That's the best you can do?' _"Ice cream?"

"Yeah. I know it sounds stupid, but I had this sudden urge for daiquiri ice, and I know this place near Vine that should still be open. I haven't had any for ages. You game?"

Maybe this was the "not doing the homework" part. "Uh, sure, okay."

"Besides, it'll be nice to talk to you without shouting over music. It was starting to get to me." He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, and Bren tensed, but he just pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. "Wanna butt?"

"No thanks. I'm trying to quit."

"Good for you. I used to not smoke, but once I came to Hollywood … well, there didn't seem any point in not doing it. It kills the time."

That was such a curious thing to say that Bren slowed as they reached the end of the block, which seemed strangely deserted. But Bren felt the eyes on him, and knew they were being followed by a big guy who had a strange way of blending into the shadows and never being seen. "What do you mean?"

As Kier clamped the cigarette between his lips, he looked at him with something like regret, and he opened his mouth as if he was about to say something -

And that's when the Ohgur attacked him.

Bren never even saw him. He just saw a movement out of the corner of his eye, and suddenly something big and dark hit him, sending him sprawling into the street. He instantly rolled over on his back in spite of the ache in his head from hitting the pavement, and he saw the thing standing over him was six feet, two hundred pounds of ugly, something like a bipedal lizard with some kind of skin disease that left his flesh mottled in an irregular pattern of ash grey and shit brown, and an expanding muzzle of sharp, urine colored teeth. Instead of hair, he had something like tentacles springing from the back of his head, moving of their own accord like snakes, and his eyes glowed like hot embers. It issued a sharp hiss, and held up a large, four fingered hand, showing off its thick yellow claws. So that's how it ripped the hearts out.

"Hey ugly, back off," Kier shouted, and suddenly grabbed the Oghur by its head tentacles and flung it face first into the brick wall of a closed adult bookshop, so hard that the bricks broke and crumbled around its head. That didn't seem to do much to the Oghur, who instantly pivoted around with a snarl, but then Kier gave it a roundhouse kick to the face that sent it stumbling back on its clawed feet.

What the hell ..? How about that! Maybe his luck was changing. The hunk that picked him up wasn't the heart eating demon, _and_ he was a fearless kung fu fighter. If that wasn't the best news of the year, he didn't know what was.

As Kier followed through with a punch, the Oghur blocked it and gave him a backhand slap across the face, one so hard that it sent him flying out into the street. As soon as he landed beside him with a thud, Bren turned and sat up, reaching for him. "Hey, you o -"

But the question died in his throat.

Kier's face had changed. Along with shallow scratch marks gouged by the Oghur's claws, he had a suddenly prominent brow, yellow eyes, and a mouthful of jagged teeth. A vampire! His pick up was a fucking vamp! Oh god, he _did _have the shittiest luck in the world.

From the thuds and flurry of movement, Angel had made his appearance, but he wasn't having much luck fighting the Oghur. The thing was these things were strong, even stronger than a vampire, and although Angel got a couple of good licks in, the Oghur had rallied, and was now using Angel's head to pound a new hole in the wall.

Oh fuck it. Did Kier think he was the only one who had a surprise up his sleeve? Bren initiated his own change, letting his spiky Brachen side come out, and attacked the Oghur from behind, using his own doubled fists to crack it on the back of its ugly serpentine head. Angel then elbowed it hard in the muzzle, and much to his shock, Kier came in, grabbing it by one of its natural dreadlocks and throwing it into the street.

The Oghur, snarling and drooling a bit of dark liquid that could have been its blood, looked at the three of them and growled before seemingly disappearing. "Where the hell did it go?" Bren asked, raising his fists in case it was going to charge from somewhere again.

"It went dark," Angel said, wiping blood from a cut on his own vamped out forehead. "It's decided that hiding and waiting for easier and tastier victims is the way to go. Time for plan B."

Bren didn't even need to ask. There was a guy loitering in the shadows of a closed deli across the street, and when Angel made a subtle hand gesture, he sprang to life, walking down the street casually, like he decided the show wasn't as good as he had hoped. It was Logan, of course, and the fight that he hadn't participated in gave him something that was normally elusive - the scent of the Oghur.

If the Oghur knew Logan was with them, it probably would have run. But most likely, thinking he was just a Human unrelated to this melee, it would remain hidden as Logan wandered by. It wouldn't know that all Logan needed was a scent; not a sight, not a noise. Just a scent, and he could track it down until the end of the world.

As it was, Logan started to walk towards the club, but suddenly paused, and pulled out a cigar. In the course of lighting it, he turned towards a dark, narrow alley, He seemed to be having trouble getting the flame to catch, so he took a couple of steps further inside, and shook his lighter like it was low on fluid.

Then the charade ended as Logan moved as fast as the Oghur had, his left hand whipping out and his claws extending in a sudden silver flash, the tips scraping the wall and scratching up brief sparks as he cut the camouflaged Oghur in half. As it fell to the ground in two separate pieces, its guts spilling out onto the alley floor, it became visible again. It also looked a little shocked. "I don't need to see ya to know where you are, asshole," Logan growled down at him, retracting his claws. It hissed at him in that angry iguana way, and he kicked it in the face, sending its upper half falling over, where, after a moment of twitching, it laid completely still.

"Okay, what the fuck are those?" Kier asked. "Claw guy and dread guy. And what was this all about?" He then backed up a couple of steps, pointing at the still vamped out Angel. "And who the fuck is he?"

Angel had a big knife he was going to use on the Oghur, although he never got a chance to use it. (It must have gotten knocked away; he thought he heard something.) But what he pulled out now was a stake, because that was his version of an American Express card - he never left home without one. "I could ask you the same thing," he said, advancing on him menacingly.

Bren could hardly believe what he was doing, but he stepped between him and Kier, and because he knew Logan had to be coming up from behind - if Angel didn't get him, he would - he gestured for him to stop as well. "C'mon guys, he helped us."

Angel stared at him in disbelief, blood still trickling down the side of his face. "Are you drunk? He was going to kill you."

"I was not!" Kier exclaimed, almost sounding offended. "He's a Brachen! They don't taste good at all."

Bren looked back at him. "You knew?"

Kier scoffed, and reverted to his Human face. The scratches were still there, but they were smaller than before. "Of course I knew. I could smell you in the club. I thought it might be cool to hang out with a fellow demon for a while."

"Really?" Was he lying? He could have been just saying what he thought he wanted to hear.

He started backing down the street, and shrugged, grimacing sheepishly. "Guess I should know better in this town, huh? See ya around." With that he turned and ran off, disappearing into the night.

Logan looked like he briefly considered following him, but instead actually lit his cigar. "Sorry about that, kid," he said, taking a puff.

Bren sighed, feeling like both the world's biggest fool, and a hundred pound sack of shit. "Why does everyone I like always turn out to be evil?"

Angel put the stake away, and even as he reverted to his Human face, he kept giving him a disapproving, paternal scowl, but it faded a little. He seemed to glance at Logan first, which may be why he changed his tack; Logan was probably sending him a "go easy on him" look. "In this town? The odds are in its favor."

He scrubbed a hand through his hair, aware he'd taken quite a knock on the head, and now it was starting to hurt. If he stayed Brachen, it would go away quicker.

He wondered if that would work for disappointment as well.

* * *

Poor Brendan. He had the shittiest luck with guys.

Logan felt bad for the kid, but tried not to show it too much, as he knew he might resent it. But it was unlikely he'd notice at the moment, as he was half-drunk and lost in a self-piteous funk. Angel wanted to take him home, but Bren stubbornly insisted on going back to the office with them, possibly so he didn't have to be alone with himself and his dismal thoughts. Logan could sympathize.

He was just filling in for Faith tonight. She had to work, which meant they both had to get out of bed (damn it!), and since he was up, he offered to help Angel out with this Oghur demon problem. It probably turned out for the best anyways, since he had to chop the thing in half. Giles had underestimated how fugly that thing was. Angel figured that Brendan and his pal there were just too tempting a "two fer" for the Oghur, who attacked them assuming it'd get two nice, juicy young Human hearts, except of course they were both demons, and it was a trap anyways. And Bren thought _he _had shitty luck?

He knew Angel frowned on it - not as much as Scott; no one could frown on something as much as Scott - but maybe he could take the kid out tomorrow night for a consolatory beer, see if he'd like to cry on his shoulder a bit. The kid did good, he really did, but he was probably too depressed to care.

When Angel entered the office, he paused as if he was briefly surprised, and Logan put a casual arm on Bren, ready to shove him aside in case trouble reared its ugly, familiar head, but Angel quickly relaxed and said, "Hey."

Once Logan cleared the door, he saw why. "Hey ya hairy bastard, how's it hangin'?" Marc said, with a sparkling grin.

Logan smirked and shook his head, actually glad to see him. But on the other hand, he knew this couldn't be good. Marc lived in Baltimore, and wouldn't be here for a casual drop in visit.

No, if Marc was here, there was trouble. And Logan just knew it was going to be his trouble too, soon enough.


	2. Chapter 2

2

Angel let them use his private office, which was nice of him, but of course meant that Marcus had fun with his desk. "Oh yeah, I feel like gettin' me a bad rug and firin' some punk little kiss ass on national television," Marc said, settling down in the desk chair and sitting up ramrod straight. He then opened the desk drawers and started looking around. "Huh. Think Trump has a desk full of stakes and knives?"

"No, he has people who do that for him," Logan replied, throwing himself down on Angel's couch. It was a fairly nice couch, comfy, also rather Gothic since it was blue velvet. Sometimes he made choices that just screamed "vampire". "So what's going on?"

He stopped snooping in the desk drawers and flashed his a sharp grin. He moved his protective goggles to the top of his head, since only a small corner lamp was providing any illumination in the room, making it easier for him to take with his infrared vision. It was always odd to see Mark's real eyes, though, alien black and eerie. "Right to business. Gotta love that about you. Okay, here's the deal. There's an Organization secret base in the Oak Creek Canyon area of Arizona."

Logan just nodded. "You want me to help you attack it?"

He grinned and shook his head. "Naw man, it's too late for that. I only found out about it after it went ker-flooey."

Logan shifted on the couch, leaning back into it, trying to look casual. He didn't want Marc to know how much that statement made his stomach twist. "It got destroyed?"

"Oh hell yeah. Made such a big boom you could actually catch parts of the cloud on Google satellite photos. I was looking into it, to see if it was a natural explosion or something else entirely, and I found these." Marc had a folder with him, a legal brown one held shut by a clip, and he undid the clip and simply tossed him the entire file. Logan caught it easily and opened it on his lap.

The first thing he saw were photos of what looked like mummies, desiccated corpses that looked a million years old, entombed in the sand of the pharaohs ... except one of them was wearing a Green Day tour t-shirt. "These aren't from the base, are they?"

"No sir, these are in a loose trail along interstate forty to the California border town of Cortez. Ten bodies in all, so far, majority Hispanic, ranging in ages from seventeen to fifty eight, three women and seven men. No connections whatsoever, obvious or minor."

Logan flipped through the photos, taking time to study them all, hoping for clues, to see something that Marc had missed. But nothing jumped out at him except the strangeness of it all; people broken down to dried bits of sinew, collapsed and leathery skin barely holding together a loose framework of bone, teeth pushing out from mouths like withered husks. People as beef jerky. Now he really felt queasy. "Somebody got out?"

"It makes more sense that what the CDC are looking for."

He stared at him in shock. "The Center for Disease Control? What do they have to do with this?"

"The first body found was that of a deputy sheriff, Juan Hernandez the Third, and his sheriff called in the feds, assuming that this was something unnatural. The feds - for whatever reason, and I'm not really clear on it - handed it over to the CDC, who seem to be investigating this like a contagion. I'm no doctor, but what disease can jerk you exactly?"

Logan closed the file, figuring he knew what was behind this. "This was a mutant, wasn't it? Someone who got away."

Marc nodded. "That's my theory; maybe they even blew up the base and escaped." Like him. Marc didn't say it, but he didn't have to. "The Org are after them, I know it, and they have a better chance of gettin' 'em than the CDC does."

He knew why Marc was here now; he didn't even need the rest of the story. "You want to find them first."

"Hell yeah. They're probably confused and freaked out and think the world's against them. We can help."

Logan swallowed hard, held up the file. "These are civilians, Marc. There's no call for it."

"I know, but the first one was a cop. Maybe they saw the uniform and panicked."

He shook his head. "No excuse for the rest."

Marc sat forward, glaring at him in disbelief. "Bud, what if they're not in their right mind? What would have happened if you ended up in the middle of civilization after Alkali Lake?"

That made him flinch. He didn't like to think about immediately after that; in fact it was hard. His mind wasn't working right, his memories were fuzzy and broken, but ... did he remember how scared he was? And he didn't know why he was scared? Yeah, he remembered that, along with the chill of the Canadian winter that even in mere recollection could make his balls shrivel up. He didn't know what he would have done if he'd actually come face to face with people in the mountains. He liked to think he probably would have hid until they were gone ... but he didn't know. If he felt threatened, he might have acted on instinct, done something he would regret in his right mind.

Oh hell, what was he thinking? He did do something he regretted- Stoff's would be drug gang up in Bear Creek, the ones who shot at Lily and tried to kill her. He'd killed them; just the sound of the guns infuriated him, rang in his ears like screams, and all he knew was he wanted it to stop - he wanted them to stop. The smell of Lily's blood made it worse; it seemed to trigger a blinding rage where he was incapable of having a single thought. All he knew was he had to make them stop, and the only way to make them stop permanently was to feed them their weapons butt first, to ram them into trees until he heard their skulls crack like walnut shells. The regret came later, along with a bit more of the sanity. They'd been kids - okay, wannabe drug runner thugs who were trying to murder a cop (and had already killed another cop he didn't know about) - and he could have disarmed them and stopped them without killing all but Stoff, but only if he was in his righter mind. He wasn't then. He was barely able to talk back then, to hold a conversation, and the fear and the noise and the smell of other people was always overwhelming him. He hadn't learned how to regulate it back then, whatever it was in him that allowed him to tolerate crowds.

God, Lily. Poor Lily. Did she ever know how much she had helped him? She was kinder than any cop had the right to be. Yeah, she thought he was a bit nuts, but he was, so that was fair enough. She could have had him charged for those deaths too, but kept his name out of it, probably because he had saved her life. Also, she felt sorry for him; he knew that she had, but she kept her pity so well couched in her warm personality he didn't realize it until later. She made him realize he could get back out in the world, if he was careful, if he did it right, and that maybe not all people were necessarily bad. He wished it had occurred to him to thank her while she was still alive.

So maybe this mutant, whoever they were, had an excuse. Maybe they weren't a cold blooded killer, just insane with fear. But that opened up a whole new can of worms, namely that since they were insane, was there any chance of reaching them? He knew he was lucky; his healing factor seemed to extend to his psyche, or - as Bob and Xavier liked to claim - it was all him, fighting his way back from total insanity. How did a person _do_ that exactly? Xavier had a complicated spiel that didn't make sense, while Bob broke it down to its simplest form: _"You're a stubborn prick. Even you don't listen to you when you tell yourself you're nuts." _That actually made more sense than anything. Bob's alternate theory was he regained his sanity just to piss someone off, which also made sense, although it was no less impossible. Could someone else come back? Well hell - if he did, anyone could. "What if they're hopelessly insane, Marc? What if we can't get through?"

He held up his hands in a shrug that admitted that was a possibility. "If that happens, we'll take care of it. But we have to try."

That was fair enough, he supposed. "Shouldn't you have gone to Xavier, though? He's got the doohickey."

"Ah. Well, don't be offended, but I did go to him first. Boy, Scott was sure glad to see me." He gave him a big shit eating grin, barely holding back the laugh.

He just bet. "Didn't shoot you, did he?"

"No, but he was thinkin' about it. Then Chuck rolled up, and he missed his chance."

"I'm sure he's still kicking himself. So what did Xavier find?"

"He couldn't get a lock. So, he figured he/she was shielded, artificially or naturally, from telepaths, or just so fucking nuts he couldn't get a lock on 'em."

He sighed like he was punched in the gut. "Damn." Which of those three options was actually the worse? Well, anything had to be better than being so fucking crazy that even Xavier couldn't get a bead on them. "Exactly how did these people die?"

Marc grimaced, making a noise like he'd asked the wrong question. "Well, it's inconclusive at this point."

"Inconclusive? Here, let me take a stab - dehydrated to death? Mummified until crispy?"

"From what I've been able to dig up, there seems to have been massive, sudden genetic anomalies."

"Speak English. Or Mandarin, I don't care, just make sense."

"It doesn't actually make a lot of sense, which may be why the feds tapped the CDC. As far as they can tell, something disrupted their DNA on a massive scale. It caused a cellular breakdown of some kind, but no one can tell exactly what the hell happened, just that something caused their genes to implode."

He scowled at him. "It doesn't work like that. Nothing can do that."

"And vampires don't exist either, dude. So where were we? Look, we're mutants - we don't make sense. How come I got poison glands _and_ infrared vision? Where the hell did that come from? And you? How the hell do you even move with all that metal in your body? And shouldn't you have died anyways? Isn't the adamantium basically encasing your bone marrow?"

He thought about it for a moment. He had a good point. "My body adapted; it has a tendency to do that. As for the bone marrow … they came up with a way to keep it from blocking it off completely."

"How?"

He shrugged. "I have no idea. I just remember some doctors discussing it vaguely over the whine of a bone saw. As for you … yeah, I got no clue. Yer just fucked up."

"Gee thanks. But you get my point."

"I guess. But how do we even find this person? Sure, they're leaving a trail of mummies behind, but wouldn't it be nice to get them before they kill another dozen people?"

"Ah, well that's where your other inexplicable ability comes in." Marc paused, as if he was supposed to guess, so Logan just gave him a death look. Finally, he said, "Your hyperactive sense of smell, bud. I want you to see if you can find a familiar scent on all the corpses."

Oh good - he got to sniff corpses! But there was a flaw in the plan beyond even that. "Uh, I thought you said the CDC were on this? So how do we get access to the corpses?"

Marc gave him a grin that was all teeth, the kind of smile a shark might give you as he was drizzling barbecue sauce on your torso. "Do you really wanna know? Might make you an accessory."

He got to his feet with a groan, and tossed the file back on Angel's desk. "Look, even if we don't end up with the feds on our ass, a scent is only gonna take me so far. Do you have any idea where this person could be headed?"

"No."

"So it's be like looking for a needle in a haystack. No, I take it back, that'd be easier; they made machines that could do that on Mythbusters. You're asking me to track a person by scent alone through the _entire state of California_, if indeed they haven't doubled back to Arizona, headed to Mexico, or cut across to Nevada. Your heart's in the right place, I don't deny that, but this doesn't have a chance in hell of working."

Marc clipped the folder shut neatly, as if Logan hadn't just told him that he was a loon (in a roundabout fashion), and said, "What if I told you I have a way to tap into the Organization's communications network? As soon as they send out an alert on a possible sighting, we'll hear it too."

"How'd you do that?"

He gave him that smart ass grin again. "I stole one of their comm sets. You'd think they'd lock their car doors, being a super secret mutant killing commando squadron and all."

Logan scoffed and shook his head, aware that he could be bullshitting him, but he probably wasn't. When you got cocky you got sloppy, and that was just a short step away from stupid. Certainly the Organization had done stupid things before; they were good at it. They must have had their own Special Kind of Stupid division. "So, assuming we beat them to the area, if I can pick up their scent, we'll find 'em faster than the Org."

"Don't underestimate yourself and overestimate them. Even if they beat us to the area, I bet you'll find 'em faster than those grunt jokers. After all, whoever they are, they're hidin' from the Org. They don't even know we exist."

While Marc meant that as a point in their favor, it was also a potential hazard. This mutant had some unknown ability to make people's DNA go fatally haywire, and on top of that they could have been a telepath, or had some kind of mental ability. There was no telling how their power worked, or if they were even in control of it. Maybe it was a projection ability, and maybe it just triggered when they were scared, putting everybody at risk when the Organization went after them.

Which was all the more reason to find them first, he supposed. He just didn't want to find out the hard way how much damage his body could take on the cellular level before it gave out completely.

3

He knew he should head home, he was starting to feel a bit ill anyways, but Brendan found himself not paying attention to where he was walking, and when he came out of his private self-pity party to look around at where he was, he noticed he was standing across the street from Syn, which was now closed.

Why was he here? Did he really think he'd still be here? It was about an hour from sunrise, the sky was already light enough that all the stars had disappeared from the sky. And what did he hope to accomplish exactly? Vampires were killers, and he knew that all too well, losing Matt to one. Yeah, he was cute, but so fucking what? Didn't make him any less a cold blooded killer.

Damn he wanted a cigarette. He'd done so well, he'd found quitting a breeze, and had no idea why everyone else complained about it. But his addiction was clearly psychological not physical, and now that he was anxious, he wanted a cigarette to calm himself down. Maybe he wouldn't be here and about to break his cigarette abstinence if Logan had included him in whatever he and Marc were up to - and clearly they were up to something - but no. They left to talk "elsewhere" - strategy outside the range of hearing, certainly - and when he tried to ask if he could help, Logan fixed him with a really scary stare, and said, "Don't even think about it, kid." Boy, _that _wasn't suspicious. Still, he liked having feelings in his legs too much to actually pursue it any further. At least when Angel asked if he could help, Logan just shook his head; he didn't feel alone in his rejection.

Except here and now. Okay, yeah, bloodsucking fiend. But he did help them hurt the Oghur, even if it was unintentional. Maybe he wasn't lying about just wanting to hang out with him …

No no no! Was he this pathetically lonely that he'd walk into an obvious trap set by a cunning vamp? The terrible truth was yeah, he was. He'd been alone a good chunk of his life, and he just got sick and tired of it sometimes. He felt invisible, unnoticed, hardly in this world at all, like maybe he'd blow away in the first scalding Santa Ana. It was idiotic, he knew it, but it didn't stop him from feeling that way.

His mind drifted back to the letter he got from his mother last week. When it arrived at the office, and Giles saw it was from a women's correctional facility in Pittsburgh, he was mortified. But as soon as he told him, Giles just asked when she was supposed to get out, and seemed nonchalant in that perfectly British way of his, but he knew he pitied him, and he hated that. He didn't want to be pitied because his mother was a crack addict who didn't even know who his father was - it wasn't like she was addicted to crack when she had him. It was just when she was with "Uncle" Steve that he got her into it, and he thought of that as the time he lost his mom. He lost her way before she landed in prison.

And then there was the deal of his mother's letter. He got one once in a while, maybe once every six months or so, and they were always rather … interesting. Sometimes she'd send him little watercolor paintings or other craft projects, as his mother was a pretty decent artist when she was more or less sober, and sometimes she'd send him these weepy letters about "not being there" for him and "letting him down", which reeked of both a twelve step program and too many Lifetime movies on the prison's cable system. Also perhaps mega doses of Prozac.

Now she was off it, it seemed. Her latest letter was rambling and weird, her handwriting a messy scrawl that went off the pages in weird areas, while her sentences had a tendency to be broken and periodically incoherent. She was weepy once more, but then on the next page became bitter and self-piteous. Was she off her meds? Must have been. Or something bizarre must have happened. He hoped she didn't get in trouble; she was due for a parole hearing next year. Maybe she might actually get out, which he would be glad for, although he realized he didn't want her coming anywhere near him. Maybe he'd go visit her, but he didn't want her, a relic of his old and unhappy life, crashing into the life he had now. Was that ungrateful of him? Was he supposed to welcome his fucked up mother - a woman he honestly barely knew - back with open arms?

Once again distracted by his own thoughts, he barely heard a noise before seeing movement in the shadows of the alley across the way, the one where Logan had finally killed the Oghur. Kier emerged from the darkness, looking much as he had earlier in the evening, only now he'd added a leather jacket over his torn shirt. "You know, it's funny, but I think I was hoping you'd come back here," he said, although there was a frosty edge to his voice.

He shrugged, not yet prepared to admit that he had come here for the same reason. Perhaps it was self-evident. "Yeah, well …"

As he petered off, Kier went on. "Did some asking around, and I think I know who you were with. There's this vampire named Angel, sees himself as some kind of "champions" of the Humans, kills his own kind. Supposedly he's a big guy, looms really well. And then there's this guy - he's probably a mutie, but no one's sure - with metal claws in his hands, known as the "decapitator", supposedly a Berserker slayer who once fought something like fifty demons in an Octavian match and walked out alive. Supposed to be bad news, if it isn't all bullshit."

"It wasn't fifty," he told him. "More like twenty five."

Kier quirked an eyebrow at him. "So that's who they were? You're a demon hunter?"

"Not full time. I'm not really that good at it."

That didn't seem to reassure him. "So you were after the big ugly that attacked us."

"Yeah. He was an Oghur demon, he was killing young men who came to the club, ripping out their hearts and eating them."

That seemed to surprise him. "Eww. Really? Man, that'll teach me not to read the papers."

"We're not after you. I mean, as long as you're not killing anyone." He realized as he said it how idiotic that was, since vampires generally killed to eat.

But Kier shrugged, stepping out onto the sidewalk. "I'm not. I don't have to; I got all the blood I want." That was such a curious thing to say, he just stared at him until he elaborated. "I belong to a bite club off Sunset, I don't have to hunt."

"A bite club? What the hell's that?"

He grimaced as if embarrassed, and Brendan was acutely aware of the stake he always kept inside his boot. Because you just never knew when you were going to run into a vampire. "It's a place where Humans come to be bitten by vampires for an adrenaline or sexual rush. We don't kill 'em; they pay us, we take a bit of blood, we're all good."

Now that he explained it, he realized he'd heard of them before, although never shorthanded as a "bite club". "A vampire whorehouse?" He tried not to chuckle, but it was hard not to.

Kier scowled at him. "I really don't like that assessment."

"Okay, okay, sorry." But it was both true and funny - he was a vampire version of a rent boy. Still, there were worse things to be, and at least he'd found the least lethal way to exist as a vampire. Of course, that begged quite a few questions. He glanced at the sky, just to see if they had the time, and asked, "You wanna go get some coffee or something? There's an all night diner a couple blocks over. The food ain't great, but it's open and pretty quiet."

He looked at him warily, his eyes scudding up and down the street as if making sure he was honestly alone. "This isn't just another trap, is it?"

"If it was, would I tell you?"

After considering that, he nodded. "Yeah, okay. Let's go."

They walked over to the diner with some lingering reservations about each other, but by the time they hit the diner and slid into one of the back booths, things had thawed between them. He was one of the odder vampires Brendan had ever met, and that was saying something. Something about Kier seemed almost Human, and not in a bad way.

He got him to tell his story, although he hadn't anticipated how weird it would be. He was Canadian, actually, from Vancouver (which confirmed Bren's personal belief that ninety nine percent of everyone on L.A. was from somewhere else, anywhere from another state to the seventh level of hell), an actor who made appearances in lots of filmed in Vancouver shows, mostly as an extra, although he was proudest of having appeared as an extra in two separate X-Files episodes, a personal achievement. Once he got out of school, he decided to try and make his fortune as a "proper" actor, and went to Toronto (where all other "Canada substituting for America" shows and movies were filmed), But after a month and a half of disappointment and barely being able to pay his rent, he decided to live by his father's axiom that to win big you had to gamble big, and came to Los Angeles.

This was a mistake, of course. He fell into more extra work, but couldn't seem to get a foot in the door otherwise. Still, through a "friend of a friend", he was introduced to Benny Lyle, a talent agent who said he'd probably be able to set something up for him. He did get a part as a "Victim number 4" in a horror movie; it was only two lines, but he figured it was better than nothing, and everyone had to start somewhere.

But the problem was it _wasn't _a horror movie: it was a vampire snuff film. He didn't realize this until his costar transformed into an actual vampire and bit him - it was a hard way to learn vampires actually existed. But the thing was, both the director and the star of the film (who bit him) thought he was highly photogenic and would have some appeal in a spin off series of films, involving a "vampire virgin" (being new at the whole vamp thing), so they turned him. He was utterly appalled that they killed him, and then expected him to just star in some of their films, killing other naïve people. So he took off from their big compound in San Pedro and stayed low, went underground, in case they were after him. He honestly didn't know, but he did go by Kier instead of the name they knew him by, Kieran Davidovitch. (Now there was a last name. Russian-Irish?)

Brendan was equally appalled, although he'd heard of such things; "demon porn", snuff films where genuine demons killed actual people. He'd never seen one, though, not even on the shelves. "Oh, there's this place on the strip where they have their own section, next to the adult films," he told him, inhaling the scent of coffee. He wasn't drinking it, just smelling it. "I saw the film I was in on the shelf once. I almost rented it, 'cause … well, I died in it. I was curious to see how much they left in. But I didn't do it; I just couldn't. Kinda chickenshit of me, huh?"

"Hell no! I wouldn't either. " And since his curiosity was piqued, he pulled out the small notebook and pen he carried in his coat pocket. Why he didn't know - he had an eidetic memory, after all, and he didn't technically need to write anything down - but he got used to writing down phone messages for the others to read when he wasn't there. "Can you give me the names?"

Kier looked between his and his notepad. "Names?"

"Of everyone involved. Production company, co-stars, people behind the camera."

His eyes widened slightly. "You're really serious about this detective shit, aren't you?"

"Yeah. I know, it surprises the hell out of me too."

Kier wasn't able to give him all the names, but some. It was for Silver Sun Productions, which sounded just a tad suspect, although he couldn't say why. He didn't remember the last name of the director, but he was a "German guy" named Uli, and his co-star went by one name, Raven, which he felt was "way too Hollywood", although she'd claimed to have starred in some '70's films, which struck him as odd because she didn't look that old. (He knew why that was now.)

He wasn't sure where exactly the compound was in San Pedro - he didn't stop to write down an address - but he told him it had a great view of the water, and had a fairly dense, compact "forest" around it. The property was huge, and if he saw it again, he'd recognize it. Bren figured it'd be easy enough to find out who owned a large parcel of land in San Pedro, and work backwards. As an afterthought, he added Benny Lyle's name, as there was a possibility he was just a sleazy agent who didn't know better, but there was a possibility he was a procurer, providing willing young victims and getting a kickback.

As soon as he was done writing it all down, Kier looked at the list curiously. "So you're gonna get Angel and this decapitator guy to go after them?"

"Well yeah. They're evil, and that's what we do, shut evil down."

Kier bit his thumbnail nervously, and asked, "If you go after them, can I come along? I know I'm technically "evil", but I really want to give 'em some payback."

"Sure, why not?" Even if Angel didn't like it, Logan would agree. No one could understand the need for revenge quite like he could.


	3. Chapter 3

3

He laid on Faith's bed, in the path of the air conditioner (which seemed to have two settings: barely working, and Arctic blast), and wondered why he had such a bad feeling about all this. Did this make him a hypocrite?

Would he have really written himself off as a lost cause, with the benefit of hindsight? He was afraid he might have, but how much of that was his own self-destructive streak he couldn't say. He watched the newly rising sun cast streaks of light against the far wall, climbing slowly, dust swirling in the rays, and he wondered if he should have turned on the t.v., tried to distract himself from his pointless thoughts. Would it have helped? Probably not.

Rags had been a vital part of Marc's plan. They tracked him down at the Way Station, and got him to 'port them to the facility where the bodies were held. Marc got to try and keep Rags quiet while he sniffed the corpses, and Logan felt it wasn't nearly punishment enough. There was a scent familiar to all the bodies, beyond the decay and rot; in fact, he thought he caught something like cancer on all of them. Cancer was just damaged genes causing aberrant cell growth; perhaps they were all hit by it as well.

Finally he heard a jingle of keys in the hall, and Faith came in, looking exhausted beyond words. "Holy shit, I miss staying up all night fighting vampires," she groused, not so much closing the door as collapsing against it, letting her weight shut it.

"Bad night?"

"I think I'm quitting. I'm starting to feel very cynical about humanity again. I remember why I went crazy and psycho and shit."

What an ironic subject to bring up now. "That bad, huh?"

"You wouldn't believe it," she told him, shucking off her coat and tossing it on the armchair. "This asshole wannabe gangster comes to the club to start some shit with his girlfriend, and tries to pull a gun. How the guy covering the door missed it I have no idea." She stripped off her shirt, throwing it on the chair as well.

"He pulled a gun?" It was a stupid question, but he had to ask it anyways. "Are you all right?"

She kicked off her shoes, and stepped out of his jeans. "Of course I am. This moron had his gun shoved right down the front of his pants, which is supposed to look gangster but is only a good way to blow your own dick off. While he was struggling to get it out of his baggy pants, I took him down and took his gun away before he hurt himself. No one should be able to get a gun if they don't even know how to handle it properly. That's why I'm so late; I was talking to the fucking cops these last couple of hours." She kicked her jeans aside and walked to the bathroom, dressed only in her underwear. She was beautiful to look at, but he could still see the ghost of bruises from her "fight" with Finch. "You know how much I love that."

"Don't we all." They spent too much of their lives with cops around. Surely they were living wrong.

Her heard her turn on the faucet, and imagined she was washing her face, as she usually did before going to bed. It was a timely reminder that she had once been evil and a bit nutty - kind of like him, but not. She couldn't claim years and years of telepathic manipulation like he could, but maybe that was just an excuse on his part. "So how did that thing with the Oghur go?" she shouted from the bathroom.

"Found it, killed it. No big deal."

"Really? So why you moping?"

"I'm not moping, I'm thinking."

"About what?"

Should he tell her? Well, why not? So he told her, about how he was basically just waiting for Marc to call him and tell him when the Org was on the move. But he also confided how he wasn't sure about any of this.

She came of the bathroom wearing a thin green camisole and blue panties, her hair loose and her expression worn, dark semi-circles visible beneath her eyes. She'd been up most of the day though; that wore on a person. Him too, even though he knew from hard experience he could go a couple of days if he had to, even three (although by then he got pretty punchy). "Need some help?" she asked, and rather than go around to the other side of the bed, she simply crawled over him. "I'd love to get a chance to see what those Organization fuckers look like, put my foot up their ass."

He looked at her speculatively, but she was smiling very faintly. On her, it looked really sexy. "But I don't know when we're gonna move. You've got work."

"Hey, didn't ya hear me? I'm quittin' before I decide being evil was easier."

"So you're serious. You figure you can get another bouncing job?"

She shrugged, rolling over on her side next to him, her back to him. She then reached behind her, grabbed his arm, and pulled it over her like he was a blanket. He rolled over on his side so he could actually put his arm around her waist without dislocating something. It also allowed him to smell her hair, which still had the scent of the club about it, but also a hint of her conditioner. "I dunno. Maybe it's time to look for a new line of work."

"Like what?"

She sighed, and settled back against him. He began to wonder if she was using him as a Human shield against the air conditioner. "I don't know. I never had any idea what I was gonna do when I grew up, y'know. Other girls wanna be ballerinas or vets or something like that, and I just never had any goals except getting by. But then when it turned out I was a Slayer, that's what's I wanted to do. I wanted to kick vampire ass for the rest of my life, just beat up loads and loads of creepy crawlies."

"How does that pay?"

"Yeah, that's the problem. It doesn't. Is that fair? What with evolution and survival of the fittest and all that?"

"You could still become a wrestler."

She elbowed him lightly in the ribs. "Yeah, sure. You just want to see me in spandex."

He nuzzled the back of her neck. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"Horndog. But seriously, you're gonna have to let me come along if you ever wanna get laid again."

He chuckled. "You don't sugarcoat anything, do you?"

"Do I have M&M/Mars stamped on my forehead? No. So what do you say?"

"I don't have a choice, do I? But … the Org is used to extraordinary people; they're used to taking them down."

"So what? Super-powered chick over here. They have to catch me first." She reached back and patted his thigh. "I know you've had bad experiences before, but you don't ever have to worry about me, Logan. I've averted more apocalypses than I've bothered to count. And there's no way in hell any of 'em can take me. Seriously, I wanna see them try, and then somehow _not _live to regret it."

He kissed her hair, and smiled, even though he knew she was underestimating the Organization. But it was hard not to admire her fearlessness, or catch a bit of it. She was good, he couldn't deny that, but so were lots of other people captured, killed, and maimed by the Organization. You almost couldn't be good enough to beat them sometimes, no matter who you were or how powerful you were. (And no matter how stupid the Org could be.)

She fell asleep pretty quickly, attesting to how exhausted she was, and listening to her slow, steady breathing was making him drowsy. He had no idea when Marc would call him, or where they'd be headed to, but he must have had time to catch some zees. And Marc would live with him bringing along someone else - ah hell, she was a good looking woman. He'd love it.

Which might actually be another problem entirely.

* * *

Should he wake up Angel? He didn't know. This was hardly an emergency … but he might not even be asleep yet; the sun had just come up something like twenty minutes ago. And he was a vampire anyways, so he didn't as much sleep, right?

Bren was hoping Giles was still around, but he had to unlock the office door to get in, which was a bad sign. "Hello?" he called out, hoping that Angel was still up, just back in his office. He'd told Kier he knew of a way through the sewer that they could get to Angel's office building - Angel was a vampire too, after all, and needed a sun free way to get anywhere - but Kier wasn't ready to face him yet. Or possibly ever; he didn't seem to like the very idea of Angel. His reputation obviously proceeded him. Would he be willing to meet Logan? Er … yeah, maybe not. Who would have guessed a demon would be squeamish about demon hunters?

Angel appeared in the doorway of his office, shrugging a shirt on. "I was just about to head down to the sewers. Why are you here?"

Damn, just when he was starting to feel good about his body again. He shook his head, and held up the piece of paper. "Don't yell at me, but I went back to Syn and ran into that vampire from earlier." Angel's eyes blazed with irritation, but before he could give him the "don't you know how dangerous that is" spiel, he went on to tell him all about Kier's story. When he mentioned the demon snuff film, his eyebrows raised, not in surprise but curiosity.

"What's the name of these people?" he asked, reaching for the piece of paper.

"Silver Sun Productions."

Angel took the piece of paper, frowning down at it like it was holding out on him. "The sun is mentioned again. I wonder if that's significant."

"Huh?"

He made a dismissive gesture with his free hand, and Bren wondered if he had been talking to himself. "Nothing. A long time ago, I shut down a demon snuff film outfit that involved an old … friend of mine. But there has to be more than one, certainly in Hollywood."

"Oh yeah, especially if they put out enough tapes to have their own section in a video stores."

Angel looked up at him, eyes narrowing in thought. "Did he say what video store this was?"

"No, but I think I know which one he's talking about. There's a huge one on the strip, and if they're gonna be anywhere, it'll be there."

Angel pointed to the computer on the desk. "Think you're up for a little research?"

"Oh boy, I'm glad you asked," he admitted, sliding behind his desk and calling up his browser on screen before sitting down. "Where do I go first? Real estate transactions? Talent agencies?"

"I want you to find the Wolfram and Hart connection."

He looked up at him, only mildly surprised. "You think they're involved?"

"Production companies and agents both need lawyers. And where do demons go for all their lawyering in this town?"

Now that he put it that way, he felt like an idiot. So he got to work, hitting the back door into Wolfram and Hart's system (that would teach 'em for using Windows), and also searching the city hall records in San Pedro for real estate transactions. He was a little tired from being up all night, and just a tad drunk, but that vodka espresso must have done something to him, because he felt surprisingly jazzed as well.

Using kung fu computer skills wasn't very thrilling (and no amount of Hollywood embellishment was ever going to make it so), but pretty soon he found a suspect connection: Benny Lyle was indeed hiring out Wolfram and Hart's services, but he had yet to make a viable connection to San Pedro. A group called the Varolac Consortium bought a huge parcel of property in San Pedro three and a half years ago, but he had yet to tie them to the lawyers. In fact, a Google search turned up nothing on the Varolac Consortium at all.

Angel had been kind enough to brew up some coffee, but since his coffee tasted like mud, Bren only sipped at it to be polite. "It must be a front, a shell company for someone else," Angel commented, peering over his shoulder. "The name Varolac sounds familiar to me, but I can't place it right now. Do you have an address for Lyle?"

He called it up on the screen. "His office is in North Hollywood. This is a strip mall location if I remember my streets correctly."

"You remember everything correctly." Angel noted, not unkindly. He straightened up with something like a sigh, and said, "I'd better get going."

Bren turned and fixed him with a hard glare. "You? You know how sunny it is out there?"

"I'm going through the sewers."

"There might not be direct access to the building, and even if there is, there's a little problem of windows everywhere. Just tell me what information you want out of this guy, and I'll get it." Before Angel could shoot the idea down completely, he added, "I won't go alone. I'll bring muscle."

He eyed him skeptically, crossing his arms over his chest. "Who?"

What, did he think he was going to say Kier? No, he needed someone much more powerful than that, who wasn't in danger of bursting into flames.

* * *

It took a whole bottle of mint mocha frappuchino before she followed the plot, and even then Naomi wasn't completely sure she got it. Okay, this guy was evil, but they had to discern whether he was just regular, everyday evil, or demonic evil. With agents, how did you tell? Perhaps that was what they were supposed to find out.

They ended up at a strip mall on the North side of town, but one of the "industrial" strip malls, full of offices rather than stores. Somewhere between the dentist and chiropractor was the Lyle Agency, an upstairs office with a wide window that overlooked the parking lot and a ribbon of freeway beyond. The lobby out front was done in earth tones, tans and dark greens that was probably supposed to be soothing, but looked rather gloomy instead. Behind a high desk sat a bottle blonde receptionist, young, perky, and yet with a bad nose job that gave her a Michael Jackson nose circa the "Bad" era. (It could have been worse; it could have been Mike's "nose" now.)

Brendan had told her before they went in that they were going to be pretending to be from Wolfram and Hart; not as lawyers, just as total dickheads. Which was good, because she didn't know much about law, but she knew how to be a total fuck.

They barged into the office, and while the blonde started her chirpy welcome spiel, they walked past her, and she stood up quickly. "Pardon me," she began, "but you can't -"

"Yes we can," Bren snapped, pivoting sharply around to get into her face. She took a step back, slightly unnerved. "We can do anything we want, and since you're not our client, I advise you don't get in our way."

"I, uh, does Mr. Lyle -"

"I suggest you take the rest of the day off," Naomi interrupted. "Lock up the office and don't return." She held up the Wolfram and Hart business card that Angel had somehow got a hold of; in fact, he had a small box of them. He admitted he wasn't sure why he kept them except perhaps as penance, which she didn't quite get. But hey, vampire - there was a lot there she didn't get.

The girl's blue enhanced eyes studied the card for moment, widening slightly, and she nervously licked her lips, meaning she definitely knew who Wolfram and Hart were. "He's uh … he's in trouble?"

"He might be," she conceded. "What about you?"

The girl looked between her and the surprisingly dour faced Brendan, and seemed to get the message. She flounced back to her desk (how did she walk in a skirt that short, and in heels that high? Maybe she was a mutant …) and grabbed her purse off the back of her chair. "I'll just … um …" she said nervously, shouldering the bag, and headed for the door. They watched her every move, glaring at her like angry Mother Superiors until she tottered out, locking the door behind her.

"That was really easy," she couldn't help but note.

"It probably helped a lot that you have electricity crawling around your hair," he replied.

Did she? She looked up, and thought she saw a small spark in her bangs. Huh. Well, it was a dry day, one of those Southern California days that always seemed to proceed raging brush fires, and she could almost feel the waiting spark in the air. Maybe she'd managed to pick some up on the way in.

They put on their stern game faces, and Brendan led the way, storming into Lyle's office first. It was just part of the game - he was the male, so in spite of his age, it was assumed he was the potential troublemaker here. Yeah, sexist as hell, but at least Brendan knew she could kick his ass if she felt like it.

Lyle had a sunny office done in the colors of sand, with a tan carpet and slightly flocked ocher wallpaper, and a window behind him looking out on more parking lots and streets. He had a big oak desk that looked imposing, and a plush leather chair (tan of course) that was bigger than any of the other three chairs in the room. It was the difference between a throne and a stool, and was surely a deliberate psychological tactic. There were also three movie posters in glass and silver frames, but she didn't recognize their names.

When they entered the office, he was turned away from them, looking out the window as he talked on one of those cellular phone headsets, the kind that only attached to one ear. He spun around as they entered, getting to his feet as his eyebrows dipped down and met over his nose, a professionally scornful look making his features look sharp. "Hold on," he barked into his phone. "Who the hell are you -"

She didn't want to go through this routine again. She just thought about it, felt the buzz of electricity in the cell phone, and had it spark. It did, shooting through the air a millimeter or two in front of his face, and he yelped in shock, battling the cell phone away from his ear like an angry wasp. It didn't matter; it wasn't going to work now anyways.

Brendan launched into his spiel, lowering his voice and spitting the words out like bullets. She couldn't be a hundred percent certain, but she thought he might have been imitating "Joe Friday" from the old show Dragnet. "We're from Wolfram and Hart, Mr. Lyle, and I'm afraid we've discovered some discrepancies in your accounts. Would you care to explain, or would you like to come with us and explain it to Mr. Meldrick yourself?"

Meldrick was the guy who was the head of the financial office over at Wolfram and Hart. They had the names of all the CO's over there - they weren't that hard to find - but finding actual job descriptions was nearly impossible.

Lyle stared at them in a kind of bewilderment that just screamed "guilty". Yes, it was a gamble, but a safe one - what sleazy agent didn't try and skim a little of the top? Hell, it was almost customary, very nearly a rite of passage, along with obnoxiously inflated retirement packages.

Lyle was a very average man with the type of face that looked like it was put together by a sketch artist at his wit's end. He had a standard oval face, a standard nose (neither too small or too aquiline, but a very happy middle), an unremarkable mouth, and a build that appeared soft but wasn't overweight or scrawny. His hair was short but stylish, a sort of dun brown, and his eyes were a clear blue. They were the most remarkable thing about him, besides the Armani pants he wore, and the Bruno Magli shoes. It was a shame he teamed it all with a cheap white shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the neck open, revealing just a touch of a fake bake tan.

Swiftly the look of guilt disappeared, and he switched over to the smooth huckster personality he must have cultivated with great care. "My accounts have always been in order. There must be a mistake."

Brendan stared at him, and she remained standing near the door, as if she was just his date and bored as hell. But in reality she was calling up all the electricity that dwelled within the wires snaking through the walls. She wasn't calling it to her just yet, just getting it ready. How were people not aware of it? She could always feel electricity around her, a light prickling against her skin, the living pulse of the city. She kind of felt sorry for people who weren't aware of it.

And not that she'd ever admit it to anyone, but when she called it up, when she had a sheer tidal wave of current at her back, she felt invincible. It was a thrilling rush … and she was vaguely aware her desire to use it made her borderline evil. But at least she had the self-awareness to know that if she _did_ take over the entire city, Angel probably wouldn't talk to her anymore.

"On your behalf, perhaps," Brendan replied flatly. Yeah, he was definitely doing Joe Friday. "We require access to all your records, Mr. Lyle."

As Brendan approached the desk, where his laptop was, Lyle held up his hands and backed up a step. "Whoa, hey, I've been a reliable employee for fifty years. You owe me a little trust."

_Fifty_ years? He looked like he was in his late thirties. Even Brendan paused, almost breaking character. So Lyle wasn't Human, or if he was, he'd made some kind of deal with the devil (or Wolfram and Hart; apparently it was more or less the same thing). "You have your life. For now. Be glad for it. Now call up your records."

Lyle stared at Brendan, fear slowly giving way to scrutiny, and even though flop sweat started beading on his forehead, he said, "You're lying. You think I don't know liars, boy? It's what I do -"

He moved his hands, she didn't know whether it was to punch Bren or shove him, but she didn't wait to find out. She called up some of the electricity, letting it flow down her arm like water, and directed a bolt towards Lyle. Since he was a demon or better than Human, she let him have a few hundred more volts than she would otherwise.

It hit him in the shoulder and sent him flying backwards, as if struck by a car. He hit the back wall and the edge of his window, which seemed to waver in its frame like a pool of water. "Fuck!" he shouted, grabbing the smoking hole in his shoulder and doubling over. "What the fuck was that?" he panted for breath, and after several seconds looked up, his eyes narrowed in pain. "What the hell are you, a Tian-mu demon?"

She'd never heard of that kind of demon before. Did they shoot electricity? "No, just a freak."

Bren let his demon side come out, so he turned all blue-green and spiky, which always brought to mind the same question: did he feel those spikes under his skin when he wasn't in demon form? He always said they weren't sharp and were utterly useless, but wouldn't getting punched with dull spikes hurt quite a bit anyways? She wanted to ask, but didn't, because she wasn't sure if it was polite or not. "I couldn't smell it before, not over that cheap cologne -" Brendan began, curling his hands into fists.

"Hey," Lyle interrupted indignantly. "It's not cheap! It's a hundred bucks a bottle!"

"-but you're not Human. What are you?"

He snorted derisively, and used the wall and window behind him to get to his feet. He was still favoring his right shoulder, the one that took the initial electrical impact. "How dumb are you people? Jesus Christ, my name's a dead giveaway."

They both puzzled over that one, but looking at the nameplate on his desk - Ben Lyle - she got it. "Oh shit. B. Lyle? You're a Belial?"

Bren groaned, as if it was a horrible pun. (Yes, it was.) "A liar demon? Hell, that makes the most sense in the world."

"But you didn't get it, did ya? Idiots. You can't shit a bullshitter. Now get the fuck outta here before the real Wolfram and Hart show up."

Naomi let electricity collect in her hand, letting it arc across her palm and fingers, and held it up so he could see it. "You're really not that good a liar, Ben. See, we're friends of Maximum Bob, and you're nowhere near his league."

The name made his eyes widen, and she saw how genuinely deep blue his eyes were. He was hiding them behind contacts that made them more pale, more Human. "Maximum Bob? You, uh … you know him?"

His fear was almost palpable. She'd heard Giles derisively refer to Bob as "king of the liar demons", and she'd wondered if he was being facetious. Since Giles didn't seem like the petty type, she figured it might be worth a shot, just to see how Benny reacted. If his reaction was any indication, Bob was at least feared among fellow Belials if not exactly revered. (And no one knew he wasn't exactly around…) "Know him? I've slept with him. Now, are you gonna tell us everything we need to know, or do I show you what it feels like to be cooked from the inside out?"

He visibly paled, eyes nervously scudding between her, her hand, and Brendan. He was going to give them everything they wanted. But the funny thing was, she wasn't sure if it was because he was afraid of electrocution, or more afraid of Bob.

Oh well; at least Bob turned out to be good for _something_.


	4. Chapter 4

4

The call came in around noon.

According to Mark, there had been a sighting of the quarry (apparently called simply "the package" by the Organization) at a place called Santiago, which Logan had never heard of. A quick check of the web and a road map that Faith had wadded up in her closet - she claimed she had no idea when she picked it up or why, which she pretty much claimed with a quarter of her stuff; he wasn't sure if that was alarming or not - gave him an idea of where they should be headed. It was a flyspeck of a town, on the outskirts of Death Valley, and Logan was surprised that the "package" had gotten this far this fast. Marc told him that a semi had been found with a driver killed in a similar manner as the other victims, which indicated that this person (whom Marc had nicknamed "The Mummy") had gotten a lift.

He and Faith got dressed fast, and headed out. Since Faith didn't have a car, they took his motorcycle, and although she complained about riding on the back, he promised her she could drive it sometime. Marc had already headed out, hoping to intercept the Organization ahead of them. Logan didn't think it was safe, but that wasn't going to stop Marc any more than it would have stopped him.

The ride down towards the desert was pretty uneventful, although Logan thought he smelled the hint of a nascent fire under the all pervasive smog. Nothing was burning yet, but this was the beginning of brushfire season, and you could almost taste it. The earth smelled baked and desiccated, as starved for water as the victims of the "Mummy". (God, how he hated that nickname. They had to come up with something better.) L.A. wasn't burning yet, but it probably would very soon. It was only a casually discarded cigarette away.

Being able to cut off road allowed him to avoid the worst of the traffic, although the heat seemed to be rising off the pavement like it was baking them, the air shimmering ahead of them long before they neared Death Valley. He was glad he left his jacket back at Faith's.

Santiago had its own "Welcome" sign, pockmarked with bullet holes, and the population number sign beneath it had been broken, so now it was simply a jagged piece of wood, also riddled with bullet holes, reading "Po". They hadn't seen a single other vehicle on the road for the past five minutes.

This end of Santiago was barren, all dirt and sky, although they eventually came upon a weathered looking gas station that could have dropped out of a '60's road picture. They could use the gas so he pulled up beside an old gas pump - maybe more '80's than '60's, but still damn old - and he discovered how awful it was to stop the bike. The heat slammed down on them like a weight, instantly making sweat ooze out his pores, and he could taste dust in his mouth. It must have been over a hundred degrees out here, and even in the shade of the gas station's roof, the heat was no more tolerable.

Faith got off the bike and told him, "I need a drink. You want anything?"

"Beer me."

"Ah, but you're driving," she replied, arching her eyebrows humorously and wagging her finger at him as she went inside the station. He heard the tiny bell bang against the door as she opened it.

He started filling the tank and wondered where everyone was. There was no movement on the roads at all, which made him suspicious, except this was probably a ghost town and wouldn't have much in the way of anything. Perfect setting for a horror story, or an A bomb test.

He was just racking the nozzle back into the pump when Faith came out and said, "Hey, you wanna come in here?"

Okay, now he was really suspicious. He crossed the cracked asphalt island and walked into the little store, which was roughly the size of a small shed, crammed with small, dusty shelves full of snacks, sodas, and "impulse items", which ranged from cheap sunglasses to road maps, pocket flashlights, and an assortment of hats with obnoxious sayings. To make things worse, their air conditioner wasn't working, and the air was suffocating, stale and heavy with dust; he sneezed three times after inhaling.

Faith looked at him askance, and asked somewhat sarcastically, "Need a Kleenex?"

He scowled at her, but in his sleeveless t-shirt and jeans, he envied her her more weather practical wardrobe of a red tank top and khaki walking shorts. But as soon as he got his sneezing under control, he sifted through the scents. "Nobody's here."

"No kidding, Captain Obvious," she said, shoving a cold beer in his hand. It was already sweating condensation from exposure to the heat. "I even poked my head in the back. Nada. Which is weird, 'cause the open sign's on the door, and it's unlocked."

He peered around, but not for people - for any obvious signs of a fight. But the store was so haphazard in its set up and arrangement he couldn't tell. It was possible there was a scuffle, or it was possible someone couldn't be assed to set up the chip display. "I'm not smelling any blood. Someone was here - a guy who chewed tobacco and needed a stronger deodorant - but not too recently. Maybe an hour ago."

"Woo! Way to use the super-smellin' capabilities," she said cheerfully, getting a can of energy drink from the cold case. "Although you know it's kinda creepy, right?"

"So I've been told."

She reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, taking out some cash and leaving it on the counter. Because she had his wallet, she looked inside, and read his Canadian driver's license. "Logan Campbell?" she read aloud, laughing. "Why the hell Campbell man?"

He plucked the wallet out of her hand, and while he scowled at her he didn't know why; it would never apparently discourage her. That was the problem of being with a fearless person. "I'd been using Smith and Jones too much."

"What, not Johnson?"

He shrugged. "I've known a couple of Johnson's in my time - didn't like 'em."

She looked at him with a sly smile, her eyes bright with mirth. "There's an obnoxious joke I could make here. Wanna hear it?"

"Do I have to?"

She looked at the small display of sunglasses, and plucked a mirrored pair off the stand, putting them on. She then pulled off a pair of deep black wraparounds, and put them on him. She grinned broadly. "You look so much like Clint Eastwood in those. Well, I mean the young one, not the one nowadays who looks like a saddlebag."

There was something very wrong at this gas station, he knew it, but rather than concentrate on it he snickered, unable to keep from smiling. There was something luminous about her that was totally distracting, and he realized bringing her along may have been a mistake for that reason. "You're too young for me."

"Everybody's too young for you."

"Oh, ouch," he replied, putting a hand to his heart as if stricken, and that was the exact moment his cell phone rang. He reached into his front pocket and fished it out, figuring it was Marc. Maybe he actually found some useful info. "Yeah?"

"Perimeter's been breached," Marc said, without preamble. Faith reached over the counter and snagged the restroom key that was basically attached to a two by four, and left the store. The air outside was devoid of anything even mildly refreshing or cooling, but at least it smelled better, so he turned and went out, into the warm shade of the gas station island. "Where are you?"

"At a gas station just inside Santiago city limits."

"The Texaco?"

"Oh, so you've been?"

"I saw it. I didn't think it was open; place looked dead."

"That's one way to put it. So how badly has the perimeter been breached exactly?"

Marc sighed, and just from that alone, Logan knew they had wasted their time coming down here. "It fell apart like a bad soufflé. They lost communication with the advance team shortly after I called you; just before I got here, they found the bodies."

He groaned and rubbed his road dry eyes, only now aware that he was still wearing the dorky sunglasses. Ah hell, he could use some sunglasses anyways. "How many?"

"All of 'em. They got the whole team. They have no idea where the Mummy's headed. We just came up serious bupkis."

"Logan." He turned to see Faith gesturing to him from the side of the station. She disappeared around it before he could ask, so he simply followed.

"So what now? We just give up?"

"I dunno. You wanna come here and see if you can pick up a scent?"

"Where are you?" As he walked around the corner of the station, Faith was pointing at something in the weedy scrubland behind the station. It was so thick with Scotch broom he almost didn't see it at first, but then the sun glinted off of something silver. "Hold on a sec."

There was a body sprawled out in the brush, dressed in a stained blue-grey coverall, with a patch that read "Ed" embroidered on the left breast pocket. But the thing was, Ed - while reeking of chewing tobacco and body odor, now also reeked of rot, the sweet smell of decay and cancer … and something else. He had been dried to a husk, a corpse that looked mummified, and was now baking in the ferocious heat of the day. Huge blue bottle flies crawled over his face, making it look like he had a living beard, and some paused to clean their forelegs on his withered eyeballs.

"They were here," he told Marc.

"Who? The Org?"

"No, the … killer. We just found the body of the station owner behind the Texaco."

"Holy shit. He's been jerked?"

It seemed not only a silly way to put it, but disrespectful, and yet it also perfectly encapsulated how they looked and seemed to be. He was pretty sure he'd never eat beef jerky ever again. "Yeah. The sun's baking him, I can't say how fresh he actually is … but I'm gonna say it's recent, certainly within the hour. Most of the rot I'm smellin' is cancer rot."

Faith grimaced as if the thought was sickening, and Marc seemed to make a similar noise over the phone. "Well, _that _was more than I needed to know. But that does tell us they went thataway. I wonder why."

But Logan thought he knew. He turned and looked from this sad vantage point, where beyond the gas station with its peeled paint and heat warped roof tiles you could see nothing but dirt and scraggly weeds, a ribbon of asphalt shimmering with heat and a sky so pale as to almost be white, and he knew. In Santiago, there was only one way to go. "They're following the highway," he told him, feeling a cold certainty in his gut. "They're headed towards the city."

"L.A?" Marc's voice dropped a octave, as it was a horrible thought. Someone with a power that seemed to be nothing less than lethal loose in such a large city, with so many potential victims. If they were smart and stuck to the poorer and grimier sections of the city, they could kill for a while before anyone noticed, even the Organization. "Well shit, where else would they go? Fresno? We gotta get them before that."

"You think I don't know that? Get here as fast as you can. They can't have gotten far." Or so he hoped. The one time they needed the Organization to not be so stupid, and they couldn't do it. The bastards were always letting him down.

* * *

Going into the sewers was always a thrill, especially when he really didn't _have_ to. But he kind of had to this time, so he could deal with it.

Bren had fallen asleep on the couch after they got back from Lyle's, and now he felt a bit ill, possibly as a consequence of having been up all night and having had his dinner be a series of several alcoholic drinks. He only barfed once, which seemed like a triumph, and he actually felt a little better afterwards. Now he felt a little shaky and queasy, and he figured he needed to eat something, but how did you eat when you were a little nauseous? It seemed almost unfair, but he couldn't complain to anyone, as he'd done it to himself.

He'd just stepped down into the sewer tunnel when Kier came out of the noisome shadows, staying in his Human form. "Got some good news for me?"

"Yep. Your former agent was a Belial demon, and he's been feeding these production companies victims for decades. Hundreds to thousands of runaways and wannabe actors and actresses have disappeared straight down that particular rabbit hole, and we'll probably never be able to name them all unless we comb through all the movies. Lyle never kept files on any of them so he could never get caught up in any police investigation."

He grimaced and looked down at his boots. "That many? You're not actually telling me the exact number, are you?"

"No. But we honestly don't know it. Assume it's appalling."

He shook his head and looked endearingly sad. "I don't know what's worse. The fact that I was killed with only four lines, or the fact that I was merely one cog amongst a billion." He looked off to the side, briefly lost in thought, then seemed to come to the decision to change the subject. "You found out where they are?"

"Yeah. Giles went down to San Pedro and took some photographs of what we figure is the place. It looks like a fortress."

He nodded. "That's it. When you hitting it?"

"Tonight; we have to wait for the sun to go down so Angel can get into play. Hey, could you smoke?"

Kier gave him a curious look. "Why?"

"I told 'em I was takin' a smoke break. If Angel doesn't smell smoke on me, he'll know I was lying."

That made him smirk as he dug out his pack of cigarette and tapped out a butt. "Wouldn't you like a smoke?"

"No. I really am trying to quit."

"They think you haven't now."

He shrugged, as Kier lit the cigarette and took a big drag, which he then blew in his direction. "They can think that if they want. I don't care."

He gave him a sly look, smirking rather sharply. "It's all better than meeting with a vampire, huh?"

Damn it, he sussed it. But it probably wasn't that hard to figure out. "Look, I'm sorry -"

He waved the apology away and shook his head. "No, don't. It's not like I told the vampires I know that I was goin' off to meet with a Brachen who works with Angel. Our lives are just filled with lies."

"So we live in the right city."

"We seem to, yeah. So I guess this means I'm not comin' with you guys, huh?"

"Well, Logan isn't with us, he's busy with something else, so no, probably not."

Kier looked suspicious as he blew more smoke on him. "Who's Logan?"

"Oh, uh, the "decapitator"."

"Shouldn't I be _glad _he's not around to kill me?"

"Actually no. No one understands or appreciates the gray areas of things as much as Logan. As long as you're not trying to kill him or someone else, odds are he'll let you walk. Angel's … um, not so forgiving, especially of vampires. But if, you know, you met us there … maybe I could talk them into it. Maybe."

He nodded, but seemed suspicious, and Bren couldn't blame him. He knew of Angel by the stories told by other vampires, and they hated his fucking guts. As he'd said before, they saw him as a traitor to the species. Maybe he'd have had better demon PR if he hadn't been so adept at killing them, but then again, he might not be alive - so to speak - to have any PR if he hadn't been so good.

Kier cocked his head to the side, as if listening to some far away noise, and after a moment, gave him a strangely serious look. "You all right? Your heart sounds a bit funny."

"My … oh, vamp thing, right?" Kier simply nodded. "I'm a little hung over from last night, and I missed a lot of sleep."

"Maybe so, but that arrhythmia suggests you need some fluids, perhaps a little food. Isn't there anyone around who wants to force feed you tea and toast?"

He stared at him in disbelief, not sure if he should laugh or not. "And what the hell are you? The Jewish mother vampire? Christ."

Kier just smiled, his lips pulling taut, as if he was trying not to laugh. "You're just too cute, you know that?" He then leaned in and kissed him, firmly but quickly on the lips. He pulled back, continuing to grin in that slightly teasing, slightly maniacal, and extremely sexy way, and Brendan felt the need to get the hell out of here before he did something he would instantly regret. He suddenly felt too hot, almost like he couldn't breathe, and he knew this was bad. "I'm … gotta go, expecting … they're expecting me," he stammered, aware that he was barely making any sense at all. Why did he become so incoherent when he got nervous? It wasn't fair.

But Kier continued to smile at him in that annoying, alluring way as Brendan groped blindly for the ladder up to the building, and he asked, "See you in San Pedro?"

Brendan just nodded, giving him a last look before scrambling up, into the building. Now his heart was really pounding double time, and he felt unbearably hot, like he had a fever. Damn it!

The problem was he didn't know if he could really trust Kier. He was a rent boy, an actor, _and_ a vampire, a triple threat as far as manipulators were concerned. He hadn't known many actors, but he had known many himbos, and they could be classic manipulators, using their obvious sexual appeal to get what they wanted. Matt was that way; he knew it, and yet Matt managed to manipulate him all the time. But whose fault was that? Shit - was his self-esteem so low he was easily manipulated by the first cute guy who was nice to him?

Yes, yes it was. Damn it! No wonder he sucked as a vampire hunter.

What could he want from him, though? If he wanted him to go after the people who killed him, that was a done deal. But how was he supposed to know that? He could take his word on it, but until Silver Sun went up in a nuclear cloud, he had no guarantee that someone like Angel would help someone like him.

He took a moment to lean against the wall and let his heart calm down a bit (if Kier could hear it, certainly Angel could), but he still felt shaky and a bit ill. Maybe Kier was right about the tea and toast. When he was certain he could actually walk without shaking, he walked into the office, only to stride in mid-conversation. " - but we know we're going to be outnumbered," Angel was saying to Giles and Naomi. He was standing by the filing cabinet, facing them. Naomi was sitting on the couch, nursing a cappuccino, and Giles was perched anxiously on the arm of the couch, looking like he wanted to get up and do something before he jumped out of his own skin. He'd been that way since he and Naomi had told him of the general death toll that Lyle had guesstimated. "And with Logan and Faith out of the picture, we need all the back up we can get."

"But them?" Giles replied, his expression one of general pain.

Angel crossed his arms tightly over his chest, not fond of being in the position of defending them. "I know, but there are few people who would see the idea of being grossly outnumbered as fun. They do."

Naomi looked between the men curiously. "Are they that good, though?"

Giles took off his glasses and cleaned them with the hem of his shirt, a nervous gesture that meant he could end the staring contest with the clearly uncomfortable Angel. "Sadly, yes."

Brendan slumped in his chair, wondering if he could put his head on the desk without garnering unwanted attention. But it was too late, as Naomi gave him a scrutinizing but not unsympathetic look. "Bren, you okay? You look a little green. I mean, not your normal demon green, the other kind."

Now Angel and Giles were looking at him too, both with variations of the same expression, little frowns and lowered eyebrows. "Maybe you should go home, get some more sleep," Angel suggested.

He turned to glare at him. "Oh right. You think I don't know what's gonna happen? You're going to leave me out of this."

"No, we're not. Believe me, we need all the help we can get."

He was probably telling the truth, but he didn't want to risk it. Then again, why was he so eager to fight? He really wasn't in any shape to do it. Maybe if he switched to his demon form he'd feel better; he always healed faster if he let his Brachen side out to play. But he hated it, he hated the way people looked at him in that form. Ooh, the demon porcupine boy; they either stared at him like he was a freak, or like they felt bad for him, and he didn't know which was worse. There were attractive demons out there - even vamps looked kind of cool, if you could overlook the unfortunate teeth - but no, he couldn't get one of those. He had to get one of the uglier ones, with little benefit to the physical repulsiveness of the form. He was a wash out as a mutant and a demon alike, which figured somehow.

The phone rang, and it seemed explosively loud, making him wince as the ring seemed to echo through his head in waves of pain. He groped for the phone and snatched up the receiver, if only to make the ringing stop before it shattered his skull like an egg. "Angel Investigations," he answered automatically.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, as if he'd stymied someone. "Is a Mr. Brendan Chambers there?" A woman finally asked. She had a husky voice, but not a sexy husky voice; it was the type of voice that suggested a bad cold or sinus infection. He didn't recognize it at all.

"That's me," he replied, with some reluctance. Strange phone calls were never good.

The woman went on to introduce himself as Louisa Parsons, the warden at his mother's prison, and he groaned, aware his mother had just fucked up her own potential parole. What had she done now? Start a riot in the cafeteria? Attack a guard? Shiv a fellow prisoner? Try and burn down the laundry room? He hated this feeling that he was somehow his mother's keeper, that he could do a damn thing about her behavior. He could barely control his own - what could he do about a woman all the way across the country, one he wasn't sure he could pick out in a line up?

But she took on a professionally sympathetic tone, one that made his stomach clench, and he knew what she was going to say before she said it. His mother was dead; she'd committed suicide. "How?" he asked automatically, not even sure why that was his first response.

There was something guarded in Parsons' response, as if she wasn't all that surprised by his question, but wasn't terribly thrilled with it. Was she worried about a lawsuit? That was probably it; everybody worried about being sued, even prisons full of professional fuck ups and head cases.

His mother had been hording her meds - no surprise to him, not after her latest letter - and took them all at once after "lights out", then tied a plastic bag around her head. She was found dead this morning, and he had to squash the urge to comment that she'd finally gotten it right. She'd tried to kill herself before, but those two attempts were kind of sloppy. Finally she figured out how to do _something_ correctly.

Parsons went on, but he really wasn't listening anymore. Her voice was a white noise blurring into the constant hum of the air conditioner. Shouldn't he feel something? His mother was dead, and yet all he felt was a mild sense of relief, accompanied by a pang of guilt. Did this make him a monster?

She said something about the "disposition" of the body, and he told her honestly that he didn't care what they did with it, and to please call him at home later since he was at work now. She seemed a bit startled by his abruptness, but he didn't wait around for any further response, as he hung up the phone.

He looked up to find all three of them were staring at him, varying levels of concern playing out across all their faces. "Is there something wrong?" Giles asked first.

He shook his head, and decided to let his demon side emerge. He felt cold, and sometimes he didn't feel the temperature so much when he was Brachen. "No, it was nothing. And I hope you don't mind me goin' demon, I just figured it'll help me heal from the hangover faster."

Would it help other things as well? He didn't know. But he could hope.

5

The meeting between Marc and Faith went pretty much as he expected. Marc put on his "gentleman" act, taking Faith's hand and kissing it as Faith looked on, torn between amusement and smacking him on the head.

Marc then turned to him, and said, "Damn! What is it with you baggin' all the hot chicks? Goddamn, you're a player."

Faith raised an eyebrow at that, but she still had a small, amused smile on her face. She found Marc as entertaining as most people did. Well, those who weren't on the wrong end of his gun, that was. "Exactly how many "hot chicks" are we talking about here?"

"Since I've known him?" Marc made an elaborate show of thinking about it, pretending to squint in thought, count off on his fingers several times, mutter something about "carrying the seven", and Logan continued to scowl at him and threaten him with a severe beating with his eyes alone. This, of course, only encouraged Marc to continue his pretend counting. "What's the square root of a hundred and two?" Marc finally asked.

Faith laughed, and even though he continued to glower at Marc, she snaked her arm through his and leaned against him, giving him a kiss on the cheek. "I don't care that you're a man whore. You're my man whore now."

"I am _not_ a man whore!" he protested, and now Marc laughed, while Faith continued to give him a sweet smile and blew him a kiss as she walked back to the bike.

Marc continued to chuckle, but he watched Faith walk away, and let out a low whistle. "Goddamn. So she's one of those super powered demon killing girls, huh? They all look that good?"

"I got no idea. Although you think I should, being a man whore." He glared pure molten death at him.

Marc just gave him his patented smart ass grin. "Oh, come on, you know I'm teasin'. And she digs it. So what's the plan now, kemosabe?"

"Oh sure, dump it on me." He scrubbed a hand through his sweaty hair, and tried to figure out what the hell they could do. "Fuck if I know. Let's follow the highway. I'll see if I can catch a scent, or see anything suspicious. Is there any pattern to the killings at all? I mean, I can see killing the advance team: self-defense. But this gas station guy? Why?"

Marc frowned in thought, scratching his head. How hot must he be having to wear those protective gloves on a day like today? "Again, all I can think is they're panicking. Totally bugfuck."

"Yeah, but they're following the road. Roads always lead to cities; progressively bigger cities. If they're afraid of people, why seek them out? When I was afraid of people, I hid. I didn't go after them, I avoided them. I was crazy, okay? I know that. But I had enough sense to know that roads led to people, and I didn't want to go anywhere near them. Nuts or not, they can't have missed this big clue, not after all this time."

He shrugged with his hands, sweat starting to glisten on his forehead. "Then there's something we don't know. Could they be looking for something?"

"Like a person? Maybe. I guess we need to go find 'em first."

"Then let's get to it," he said, walking back towards his rental car. How Marc had found a rental Jaguar he would never know.

He led the way back up the road, his bike on point, and it wasn't really that easy to parse scents at sixty miles an hour. But he really wasn't trying, not since he figured their quarry had taken the station owner's car. (Who'd walk out on foot in this heat? You'd have to be suicidal on top of crazy.)

They'd been on the road for about twenty minutes, the bleak landscape of the Death Valley outskirts giving way to the bleak outskirts of Barstow, endless stretches of highway with lots full of scrub brush, drainage ditches, and the occasional cluster of mobile home parks and strip malls. There were long stretches that reminded him of parts of Nebraska and Alberta, places where the emptiness seemed not wild and untamed, but hollow and sad. The emptiness of death, of something that had once been and no longer was, something so fragile and needless it wasn't even remembered anymore. All it left was a blank, an empty space where something used to be, but no one could say exactly what.

The smell of the wind changed suddenly, a stark and harsh scent of smoke and cordite, the acrid taste of gunpowder. And on top of that, there was the sharp sound of multiple gunshots up ahead.

He signaled for Marc to pull over as he swung over onto the soft shoulder and killed the engine. As he did, Faith, who'd been holding on to his midsection, leaned forward and started to say, "What's -" But more gunshots rang out, closer and louder this time, and she interrupted herself. "Holy shit, who's shooting?"

"I dunno." But he thought he recognized the sound of the automatic weapons - Organization issue. He could be wrong, but that was his hunch.

As soon as Marc pulled over and got out of the Jag, he heard it to. "Think the Org found them first?" Logan asked, although it wasn't really a question.

Marc held up the radio he stole from the Organization. "There hasn't been any communication at all."

"They might have gone radio silent."

"Shit."

"So what do we do?" Faith wondered. The three of them exchanged quizzical glances, but there was a tacit understanding as well - what else _could_ they do?

They proceeded ahead on foot, deciding they didn't need to announce their arrival to anyone, but that was okay, as they didn't have far to go.

What they saw was weird and inexplicable, so much so that Logan wondered if they were hallucinating. There was a couple of police cars - Barstow PD, along with at least one from the California Highway Patrol - engaged in a shootout with an Organization unit. There was a huge black utility vehicle - Organization property, obviously; it looked like a prisoner escort van - on its side, which the Organization boys were shooting from behind, while the still moving and living cops were crouching behind their cars, which gave no cover at all. The Org were using armor piercing rounds that plowed through the cars like they were made of plywood. There were three Org members dressed in black sprawled out on the highway and the side of the road, floating in pools of lurid blood, while there were approximately six cops splayed out on the highway and opposite side of the road in even bigger pools of blood, with good portions of their heads or bodies missing due to the large rounds the Organization used. Were they using adamantium bullets? They'd punch through cars and people like they weren't even there.

"What the fuck is this?" Faith asked with a gasp. "Since when do these guys engage in shoot outs with the cops?"

"They don't," Marc said, sounding just as puzzled. "They're totally low profile. They usually pull rank and don't have to worry about local or federal interference."

No, it didn't make sense, but what especially didn't track was a Highway Patrol car involved in this. He was trying to imagine how this scenario had unfolded - the HP tried to pull them over? - but they could just flash their bogus clearance and drive off. What had led to this?

As they looked on, totally unnoticed by either group, another cops' head dissolved in a crimson mist as a bullet punched through the trunk of a car and exited through his skull, and Logan sighed. He had no love for cops, no one in their group did, but it was clear what they had to do. "You guys ready?"

Marc nodded, lips thinning to a grim line, and Faith concurred. "As ready as we'll ever be."

Marc, the only one of them carrying a gun, pulled his most powerful piece, a Smith & Wesson model 500 Magnum, a big ass hand cannon that would have led him to a phallic joke if anyone but Marc had been carrying it. (But Marc had it presumably because he was expecting a fight with the Organization. It wasn't like that was an easy gun to carry in any circumstances, even with a shoulder holster.) He took aim and fired, the noise and kickback of the thing incredible, as he and Faith moved beneath his covering fire.

Even the cops were startled, jumping and turning as Marc sent some of the Org guys scrambling for cover, although he seemed to tag one in the temple and sent him falling to the dirt, blood spurting from his head like he was an extra in a Tarantino film. Faith rolled under a randomly fired hail of bullets and came up to her knees behind one of the Barstow PD cars, now cradling a shotgun one of the dead cops had dropped.

He ducked low and scrambled to a farther car, one that looked more like Swiss cheese, mainly because it was almost perfectly parallel with the overturned prisoner transport. Along the way, he noticed a cop laying in a still growing puddle of blood in the dirt, making a gurgling noise as they struggled to breathe, and on the way he grabbed them (her - it was almost impossible to tell physically since she was wearing a bulletproof vest and her face was covered with blood) and dragged them behind the meager protection of the car. He felt a bullet rip into his shoulder, but it hit a bone and ricocheted away, too fast for him to honestly tell if it was an adamantium bullet or simply a high velocity round.

As he grabbed a still warm sidearm from a dead cop, trying not to put his hand in a puddle of goo where his guts used to be - it now looked like gory pudding - he shouted to the cop, "What happened here? Do you know who these people are? Did you call in back up?"

He looked down at the cop, and quickly assessed her wounds with a clinical detachment that suggested he'd done this dozens of times before. She was most likely terminal; she took a round in the arm, but then it exited into her chest, totally bypassing her vest, which may have been useless against these rounds anyways. From the way she was struggling to breathe and the way her chest gurgled, her lung had taken the bullet, and it was possible she was drowning in her own blood. He could do a tracheotomy easily (wait a second - since when had he known how to do a tracheotomy?), but her lungs were the problem, not her trachea.

He looked down at her as Faith's shotgun boomed, and her wide brown eyes met his. He wasn't sure how much of this she was comprehending; her chocolate colored eyes had a glaze of shock and pain, and blood was starting to dribble from her mouth. She was dying, and even if an ambulance arrived here right this second, she probably had too many internal injuries to survive.

He didn't know who she was, or why she was even here, but he was suddenly furious on her behalf. Those Organization fuckers - they just had to spread the wealth of their pain around, didn't they?

A bullet whizzed past his head, buzzing like an angry hornet, and he tried to will her to hang on, just for one minute more. "I'm a sniper with the Emergency response team of the RCMP, Officer. I can help you if you let me. What the hell's going on here?"

Okay, it was something lie; a total lie if Lafayette had made it up. But if it allowed someone to die with some kind of peace of mind, it wouldn't be so bad.


	5. Chapter 5

The woman made a noise that made him internally wince, wet and strangled, but he kept it from his face because she didn't need to see it. No one knew how bad she was more than she did. It seemed to take an effort of will, but she finally forced out, "CHiP found a car, and a sick passenger, belligerent, called in back up. Feds arrived first, tried to take -" she paused to make that noise again, a horrible sound, fresh blood appearing in her mouth. " - person, seemed wrong, tried to tell them they'd work it out at the hospital. We were coming up when they shot him." She choked again, coughing up a fine spray of blood.

Okay - so the highway patrol found their quarry in a stalled out car? Something was obviously wrong with them, so while he didn't engage, he called in back up, and maybe an ambulance that wasn't here yet. He thought something was funny with the Organization's request, or thought the quarry was too sick; either way, he didn't play ball. So they shot him for doing his job a little too well. It still seemed extreme for the Org, especially with witnesses arriving.

Her hand flopped against her chest almost spasmodically, fingers clenching and unclenching, and before he was aware of what he was doing, he'd grabbed her blood smeared hand. She was ice cold, all her blood was pouring into her midsection, and her grip was weak. "Lucia Mendoza," she rasped.

"Alex Logan." Was that the name he was a sniper under, or was that solely his name in Canadian Intelligence? Oh hell, it didn't matter - they were all fake names (as far as he knew).

She made that noise again, before forcing out another question. "You really RCMP?"

He nodded as a bullet punched through the hood and a gout of steam erupted from the side of the car. It obscured his view of Faith and Marc, at least for the moment. He saw no point in telling her "maybe"; the truth had no place here. "They're gonna pay for this," he promised her, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze.

She gave a faint nod, and maybe she attempted to squeeze his hand back, but it wasn't working. Still, he saw some spark of determination in her eyes below the shock, and it was almost heartbreaking the look of trust she was giving him. He felt like a heel, so as another barrage of gunfire strafed them, he fired back blindly, not aiming and not caring. None of the bullets they had would punch through that Organization van; it was perfect cover, which is why the cops were getting shot down like slow targets in a shooting gallery, and the grunts had all the time in the world to reload and fire again. It was only a matter of time before a gas tank went, and the few survivors were blown to hell. That was probably their clean up strategy.

Her hand went limp in his; just limp, a dead, cold thing in his hand. He looked back at her, her eyes were closed, and he didn't know if she was unconscious or dead, and he didn't check. It didn't matter, as if she wasn't dead now, she would be in a minute. They all might be dead in a minute if the grunts got a lucky shot and hit a tank.

That was it. He was so angry he was shaking, his blood was pounding in his ears so loudly the gunshots seemed muffled, so he slid his gun along the asphalt to one of the surviving cops behind a neighboring car as he placed Lucia's hand down on her useless bulletproof vest. "Cover me!" he roared, vaulting the roof of the cop car and charging the overturned van as bullets swarmed towards him like angry bees. This was it - no more dying.

They hit him but he felt little more than impact, each like a donkey kick, as his skin tore and burned at the penetration site. Some bounced off bones, others went through, but almost none hit anything vital - or at least vital enough to slow him down. As soon as he was even with the van they couldn't shoot him without leaning around the side and getting picked off by a cop or Marc or Faith, but he didn't wait for them to try. He grabbed the edge of the former roof of the van and hauled himself up, popping his claws as he lunged at the grunts behind the van.

Heads swiveled and guns turned, but they looked like they were moving in slow motion to him. He lashed out with his claws, shredding guns, and came down feet first on the chest of the guy who looked like the high ranker, collapsing his rib cage as they hit the ground. Some of them shot him point blank, but he was so enraged he barely felt the pain of it, he just tasted the cordite and blood as he shredded their guns and kicked out, shattering kneecaps and femurs with single, savage kicks. He slashed the faces of some of them, cutting open eyeballs and slicing open noses, sharp pains that made men turn away stumbling and screaming, temporarily blind and horrified by the feeling of their own blood spurting from their wounds, and when one man came at him with a hunting knife he rammed a single claw straight through his right lung. "At least you still have one; it's more than she had," he growled in the man's face, as he stared at him in wide eyed shock.

But that's when he saw what was wrong with them. Their eyes were glazed, the pupils blown, and the whites had the faintest tinge of yellow in them. It wasn't jaundice - it was a drug. He could smell it in their sweat and blood, something like lysergic acid and rust. The man was staring at him incomprehensibly, making little noises that were almost grunts, the rudimentary language of being that had lost the ability to form language.

One of them shot him point blank in the back, the impact making him stagger as the powder flash burned his skin, and the bullet ripped through him, missing bones all the way, and punched straight unto the grunt in front of him, hard enough to splatter his blood all over his face.

Logan turned, claws flashing in the sun, adamantium tearing the gun to ribbons, and he brought his other fist around as he spun. At the last second he retracted his claws and simply punched him, but he didn't hold back like he did in the cage fights. He felt the man's eye socket shatter beneath his knuckles, his cheekbone cracking like porcelain, and the grunt thudded against the van's undercarriage before collapsing to the asphalt.

A grunt with a broken leg scrabbled along the ground for a gun, and Logan stomped on his hand, grinding fine bones beneath his heel. He was tempted to just start breaking as many bones as possible in every one of these fuckers, because it was painful and not fatal, as long as he avoided the neck and spine. He realized he could feel a catch in his chest when he tried to breathe, and he figured the bullet he got in the back had ripped into his lungs on the way out. Funny. What, was it a theme with these assholes?

One of the grunts near the front end of the van found a gun, and held it up in spite of his broken arm, sighting him with drug glazed, distant eyes. Logan just sneered at him and his rampant stupidity. "Don't you know who I am? I'm one of your boss's fucking attack dogs, codenamed Wolverine." There was the slightest glimmer of recognition somewhere deep within the man's eyes, and something else, exactly what he wanted: the sour smell of fear. "You think bullets mean anything to me?"

There was no response, but he hadn't expected one. Besides, he'd just finished talking when a dark hand grabbed him by the throat. The grunt meant to react, he could see it in his eyes, but by then Marc had dug in his fingernails, and the paralyzing toxin had already hit his bloodstream. Marc let go, and he toppled stiffly to the ground like an imbalanced statue.

Just behind them, one of the grunts with a broken leg had managed to get up to his knees, holding an automatic pistol, but Faith simply snap kicked him in the face, and he went down like a bag of hammers.

Logan caught movement out of the corner of his eye and pivoted swiftly, but it was just a cop coming around the other side of the van gun first, just like he was taught. He was glad he'd already retracted his claws, as he didn't want to know what they would have done had they seen that. The cop with the gun inched around, and seeing the soldiers laying unconscious or mewling in pain splayed out on the ground all around them, his face took on an almost comical look of wide eyed astonishment. He then looked at him, and asked the best question in the universe: "How the hell are you still alive?"

He had no answer to that (well, at least that he could tell him), so he didn't give him one. The guy was a deputy clearly, with one of those horrible little cop mustaches that could have been the facial hair of a '70's porn star with just a centimeter more length on each side. He was Hispanic and on the short side, but built like a bulldog, suggesting he didn't sit on his ass every day eating doughnuts. He was also splattered with blood, it stained his uniform, and Logan wasn't completely sure if it was his own or someone else's.

More cops came around, but there were only four still capable of standing (all Barstow - he didn't see a CHiP uniform among them), and two of them were bleeding pretty badly: a rangy blond cop, limping and bleeding from a leg wound and from a cut (nick?) on his face, and a sturdily built female cop whose left arm was hanging limp at her side and dribbling blood like a gutter in a rainstorm. They all had their guns out and aimed on the men, even though none were in any condition to resist, and few of their weapons were still in one piece. But they were still freaked out by what happened, it was probably the first time most of them had fired their weapon off the shooting range, and several of their colleagues and (possible) friends had just died. Worse yet, this was totally senseless; if it was a bank robbery or something, gangs having a go, it would make sense. But these were weird guys with strange bullets just shooting at them for no particular reason. People needed meaning, they needed a reason of some kind. "Just because" pleased no one.

"Who the hell are you people anyways?" the female cop asked, scowling at him, Faith, and Marc.

He could taste blood in the back of his throat, and black spots were starting to dance in front of his eyes as the oxygen content of his blood dropped. He was healing, he could feel the burning in his lungs, but he did get shot more than he thought so it was taking a moment. Blue started to push in at the corners of his vision, and he tried to push it back - gods didn't belong here either - but it was autonomic, like his healing factor.

"Would you believe we're superheroes?" Faith asked, sounding genuinely curious.

"We're members of Canada's Special Operations Joint Task Force Two," Logan replied, the lie burbling easily to his lips. Maybe he'd also inherited Bob's ability to bullshit.

This earned him puzzled looks from everyone, including Faith and Marc, although the latter were careful not to let the cops see it. "What the fuck is that?" the blond cop asked bluntly.

"That military?" the deputy wondered.

"In a sense," he replied cryptically, deciding not to get into it.

"You're Canadian?" the lone uninjured cop (save for some glass cuts on his face) asked with genuine shock. What the hell was _that _supposed to mean!

"You've been shot," the female cop said, gesturing at the many holes in his shirt. He was splattered with so much blood they couldn't tell he wasn't actively bleeding, which was good.

"You should sit down," the deputy said, giving him a scrutinizing look from head to toe. The look on his face seemed to say he thought he was going to die within the next few minutes, and he had no clue how he was still alive, not to mention still on his feet.

"I know how it looks, but -"

"Sir, you need to sit down now," the deputy interrupted, in his stern cop voice.

He got it. Part of it was concern for someone who appeared to take a half dozen bullets, but part of it was fear over a man who could take so many bullets and not only still be standing, but still defeat so many mad gunmen while apparently unarmed. He knew the deputy was weighing arresting him, simply because none of this made sense, but his potentially fatal injuries were stopping him.

Faith grabbed his arm, and whispered in his ear, "Logan, please, just do it." She continued holding on to his arm, as if holding him back, and just for her he did it, and she sat down with him, keeping a hold of his bicep. It annoyed the shit out of him that she was so afraid he'd attack the guy she was holding on to him, but after a moment he realized she wasn't holding on to him for that reason. "That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen," she hissed angrily into his ear. She must have been referring to charging the van. "And I've seen stupid. Hell, I've _done _it." But after a moment she kissed his cheek and rested her head on his shoulder, giving his arm another squeeze. "You crazy bastard. I don't know whether to hit you or fuck you."

"Right this second?"

She punched his thigh - and damn did that hurt! It was all he could do not to yelp - but she hid her face against his shoulder so the cops didn't see her laugh.

The cops started cuffing the grunts in spite of their injuries or lack of consciousness, but they ran out of those plastic tie thingies quickly. Also, they started to notice other things. "What the fuck happened to these guns?" the female cop exclaimed, nudging some shredded pieces of an automatic rifle with her toe.

The uninjured cop pointed down at the guy Marc had paralyzed, and asked, "What'd ya do? Give him the Vulcan nerve pinch?"

He could breathe much easier now, and there was no pain, not even burning. The blue was edging out into his normal field of vision now, filling him with light. "These guys are full of drugs; check their pupils."

The deputy did, and one of the soldiers grunted at him, a noise as sharp as a bark, making him take a step back and unconsciously drop his hand on the butt of his now holstered gun. "Are you sure they're not just sick? The white's are yellow."

"They're not, trust me. They can't even talk."

"Isn't that convenient?" the deputy replied, glaring down at the cuffed man at his feet like it was his fault. Maybe it was; there was no visible signs of ranking on these grunts. No visible sign of anything, in fact.

There was a sharp burst of ambulance sirens, finally arriving, and Logan realized something. "Hey, where's the person the CHiP tried to take in?"

The deputy looked at him sharply. "How'd you know about that?"

"Mendoza told me."

The blond cop suddenly looked towards him, dismay and something close to panic distorting his features. "Lucia? Is she ..?"

He shook his head. "Sorry. She got a bullet in her lungs."

His face seemed to collapse in on itself and he turned away, so no one could see him. He was either her partner or something more, maybe boyfriend - either way, this hurt, seemingly more than his bullet wound.

"We're gonna have to take you guys in," the deputy said. "Just until we can confirm your identities and figure out what the fuck happened here."

Faith's feelings were crashing into his, the blue light making everything too clear, too sharp, and he knew that he'd need to get out of here as soon as possible. He couldn't let them take them, not when the quarry - whoever they were - was mysteriously gone. Every minute they were gone was another minute that someone else could be dead.

He slid his arm out of Faith's grasp and stood up, letting the power flow through him, out of him through his eyes, into his throat, as he stared at the deputy, and said, "You are not taking us in." Was he nuts, or had his voice changed? He sounded a little like Bob when he went into "god voice" mode. "Make up whatever story you have to, but we were not here. You won't remember us."

The deputy stared back, dazed, and the other cops, looking towards him, looked frozen. He felt like a cobra hypnotizing his prey, and he had no idea how he was doing it. The answer, of course, was that he wasn't doing it at all; Bob was doing it for him. "Now tell me where the prisoner is."

The deputy - whose name he suddenly knew was Carlos Garcia, a man who lived in fear that he was actually gay since his sex drive was almost nil and he didn't find women particularly attractive, even though he never found men all that attractive either, making him wonder if he was just some kind of sexless freak, a condition that led him to throw himself into his work wholeheartedly to get his mind off such things; a man who lived with a dog and two cats, who hadn't talked to anyone in his estranged family for ten years yet told people at work he saw them every Christmas, even though in reality he spent it at home alone, or volunteering to bring toys to kids in the annual police charity drive, just to keep busy - almost seemed reluctant, but couldn't resist him. "They stole a squad car and took off during the gunfight. I tried to call in an APB but I don't know if it got through to dispatch before a bullet took out the radio."

"How are you doing this?" Marc asked curiously.

"Logan?" Faith asked, in the kind of voice that suggested she hoped this was just some kind of joke and not him being possessed by an evil entity.

He tried very hard not to look at anyone else, as he didn't want to know them. He got it now that Bob wasn't just a nosy bastard - although he was - but he couldn't help it. He wasn't a telepath; to call him a telepath was an insult. He didn't read your mind; he didn't have to. He would look at you and he would _know_ you - your every secret, your pain, he would know it as intimately as his own. You were a book, and when he looked at you, the first thing he saw was your life spread out all around you. And somewhere in the back of his mind, Logan felt a sting of panic: what had Bob seen when he first saw him? "What can you tell me about this person?"

Garcia shrugged. "Not much. I didn't see them, I just saw the car driving off and knew it wasn't one of us."

"Gender?"

"Man."

Glancing at the grunts, he could see their minds were like broken mirrors; they were shards, fragments of a greater whole, a distorted reflection. The grunt he had talked to, whom he had identified himself to, had a strangely elliptical and manic train of thought; he kept thinking _"Wolverine, alpha target, normals don't pursue without proper equipment. Wolverine, alpha target, normals don't pursue without proper equipment -" _And he was the only one with any kind of thought train that could be followed.

Almost as an afterthought, he added, "You'll all be fine," meaning the cops. He actually didn't care if the grunts ever got better or not, although he was pretty sure they would. The only one who had a really serious injury was the one who took the bullet that passed through him.

Logan turned towards Marc and Faith but looked down at the ground, although not quite quick enough to avoid seeing them both jump back in shock. "Dude," Marc said tentatively. "You've got Bob eyes."

"Yeah, I was about to say that," Faith agreed.

He was pretty sure that they meant his eyes weren't simply cobalt blue but bleeding energy, electric blue filling his eye sockets and imbuing into the air. He could almost see it himself, in his mind's eye, and it was pretty disturbing. "I am his avatar, you know. I'm kind of stuck with his powers for now. We'd better go."

The EMTs were here, but as they walked past them, Logan said simply, "We're not here." And they weren't; the EMT's did their triage without giving them a single glance as they started walking back down the road towards their vehicles.

"Why's your head down?" Faith asked.

"I can't look at either of you. I don't have total control of his powers yet." He hoped they didn't quiz him further, as he wasn't sure what he'd say.

"You seem to be doing a good job anyways," Marc noted, but he left it at that.

He could feel it all, all the pain left behind him; it tasted like blood and ashes in his mouth. Marc's and Faith's thoughts were crashing into him, but were too jumbled up with his own for him to make any sense of them. All he got was feelings, and too many of them as well. His head was starting to throb, hurting like he was about to have some sort of cranial meltdown. "I'm gonna pass out in a minute," he warned them, actually hoping that was true. The pain was building exponentially, bringing up a blue glow when he closed his eyes, a light brighter than the sun. It felt almost as hot. "But I'm gonna be okay. It's just Bob takin' his power back before it kills me."

"What?" Faith replied, alarmed. Or he thought she said it; he wasn't hearing well at the moment, mainly because he was hearing everything all at once, and with so many people's thoughts running through his head, he was hearing everything through a hum of gibberish and white noise.

"I'll be all right. It's just -" he felt his legs give way, but he didn't feel his knees hit the pavement. Someone may have grabbed him, maybe both of them, but in the burning heat of the light he didn't feel it. He just felt the hollow shell of his body all around him, a soft prison, one he was dying to leave -

- and he found himself on a lawn chair besides a sapphire blue pool, a rum drink with a straw of speared fruit chunks sticking out of it sitting in his hand. Bob was sitting on the diving board across the pool from him, wearing nothing but a scarlet Speedo. He was grinning at him in a way that made him suspicious. "You're full of surprises," Bob told him. "You know how refreshing that is? I don't meet too many people who surprise me."

"Why are you wearing a Speedo?" Logan looked down at himself, hoping he hadn't put him in a Speedo - he'd have to kill him then - but Bob had put him in the type of long surfer shorts Bob liked to wear. They were bright blue with a pattern of bright green palm trees and red parrots on it; not so much loud as positively flaming.

"'Cause I knew you'd balk if I was starkers."

He sighed, taking a gulp of his frou-frou rum drink. It went down sweet and warm, like molten honey. "Yeah, I would. I really don't wanna see your junk."

"I don't blame you. You'd never be able to live with the jealousy." He flashed him that grin again, amused at his own joke, as only Bob could be. "You're embarrassed about it, aren't you?"

"Your dick jokes? No."

"That's not what I'm referring to, and you know it."

Yes, he knew what he was referring to: Lucia. "Sometimes I do stuff, okay, and I don't know why I do it. Don't start."

But Bob didn't take the hint - did he ever? "Not many people are capable of that kind of compassion towards a stranger. Especially a person who's been through what -"

"Shut the fuck up," he snapped, angry enough that he considered throwing his glass at him. But the drink was good and he was parched, so he didn't. "Just drop it, okay? Put the power back in its box and let me wake up. I've probably freaked Faith out. Marc's used to me passing out for a bit to heal, but she isn't. "

Bob stared at him, but he knew he was looking through him, as he usually did. Now Logan knew what he was seeing, and it made him squirm. "You love her?" It almost wasn't a question.

"She's too young for me. I'm not sure how our relationship would ever work."

Bob shook his head. "That's not an answer."

"Well you know the fucking answer, don't ya? So why are we even talking about it?"

Bob gave him a sly smile that had a tinge of sadness and regret to it. "Beneath all your armor, you're still something of a romantic at heart, just like me. It's a total bitch, isn't it?" And with that, he stood up and jumped into the water, hardly making a splash, and sliding smoothly and sleekly under the water like a seal, his body a narrow shadow over the cloud painted tiles. That was the end of the conversation, and he was glad. He didn't think he could take more conversations with Bob.

6

Waiting for sunset was a real pain in the ass, but they had no choice in the matter. Still, waiting wasn't good for Brendan.

He tried not to think about his mother, and it was growing harder not to do it the more time passed. He snuck off to the bathroom several times, went out once to "get something at his apartment", but really he just went to the Way Station and got Lau to give him a Long Island ice tea and a "red jolt" (Red Bull and vodka)- or two. Two and a half. He was glad Lau was on, as he didn't judge, and he wouldn't rat on him to Angel. He cried a couple of times, but he wasn't sure why, and he hated himself for his weakness. He wasn't sure if he was crying for him mother or himself.

He ate a taco to get some food in his stomach, and went to the Church of the Stone Temple, just to sit and gather his thoughts, but he didn't like his thoughts so he left. He did pick up his necklace, though, the ones blessed by the Gorgons. It might help; it couldn't hurt.

They kept asking him what was wrong: Angel, Giles, Naomi. They knew that call he received had unnerved him, but he lied and said it was nothing, just his mother fucking up her parole, and he was so suddenly angry he didn't know how to deal with it. How did you deal with this? He swallowed it as best he could, but it was an ember smoldering in his stomach, burning and leaden. As they prepared to move out, he armed himself appropriately: compact crossbow, a belt pouch quiver of small arrows, silver, wood, copper; a large, sharp hunting knife that reminded him a little of one of Logan's claws; two stakes (in case he lost one); an explosive glass globe of holy water; and a Glock 23 handgun with a thirteen round capacity. Logan had told him they were standard issue armaments of the feds, the FBI in particular, but Logan didn't say how he knew that. Maybe he didn't know.

He made sure the gun had a full clip and grabbed two more, trying to find places to conceal them on his person (still within easy reach) when Angel came into what they called the "war room" (where they stored all the rest of their weapons) and closed the door, leaning against it as though blocking the way out. He stared at him, his dark eyes slightly fathomless, and Bren shook his head as he found room in his boot to shove a clip in (yeah, it hurt, but it would only be for tonight). "Let's not do this."

"Brendan, what's going on?" he asked, ignoring his request. "You've been upset since that phone call, and I know you were lying earlier."

"I don't wanna talk about it."

"You've also been drinking," he added sharply. "Did you really think Altoids would be enough to block the smell for me? You smell like a bar."

"I _said_ I didn't want to talk about it," he snapped, whirling to face him. "I am not drunk, I just needed a shot of courage to walk into a den of vampire snuff film makers, okay? I'm ready; let's go kill something." Angel looked surprised, and he thought it was his anger that did it, but Bren caught a glimpse of his hand, and saw that he'd demoned out; he was so angry he lost control of his form. It seemed inordinately hard to change back to his Human form, and he wasn't sure why. He also wasn't sure why he bothered to shift back to his Human form, as he wasn't going into battle that way. Demons took him more seriously as a fellow demon.

"I don't think you should go," Angel told him. "You get emotional, you get sloppy. Believe me, I know."

"I am _not _emotional. In fact, I'm just the opposite, Angel. I'm a cold blooded bastard who has to get out there and do something constructively violent or I'm going to go crawl inside a bottle and never get out again. Now are you gonna get out of my way, or do I put you through the door?" Was he channeling Logan there? He had no idea where that had come from. Angel had always been very decent to him; he had no problem with him. But he felt like a spring had been wound tightly within his chest, and if he didn't go out there and do something right this second, he would explode; he could almost picture his entrails hanging from the ceiling like gory streamers.

There was no anger in Angel's expression, just concern, and it made him hate him for a moment. "Is she dead?" he wondered, taking a stab in the dark.

It was a stab that seemed to cut right through him, made the ember in his gut throb, and he didn't even realize what he was going to do until he did it.

He charged him, so angry he could see only red (he always thought that was just an expression), and hit Angel square in the jaw.


	6. Chapter 6

He was horrified at his reflex - Angel was going to beat the shit out of him - but he was still in Human form, so the punch barely turned his head. Still, Bren backed up as Angel looked at him with an irritated gaze, working his jaw like it hurt a bit. "Do I even need to ask what that was for?" he grumbled.

His hand hurt a little. Also, the ember flared up again in his gut, and his horror at punching Angel faded away as he realized he wasn't going to get his ass kicked. "I need to go," he explained, his stomach making an annoying noise. Maybe he shouldn't have had that taco, or at least he should have had something better. "I can't stay here. You know I was a demon hunter here before you came back; I can handle this. I know what I'm doing."

He rubbed his jaw and raised his eyebrows at that. "Is that why you're taking an arsenal?"

"We have no idea what we'll be facing. There's no harm in being ready for anything."

He nodded, seemingly accepting that, but Bren knew better. His eyes had that unfathomable look again, like he knew something about him that he didn't. (Which was possible.) "We're going to have to talk about this."

"Not now. I can't talk about it now."

Angel fixed him with a stern glare that was almost angry. "And no more punching your friends?"

He held up his hands in mock surrender, "I promise. Not unless you turn evil or something."

He nodded as if that was the right answer, but there was something in his eyes that said _"Don't do it again - or else"_, and no matter how pissy he was right now, he was all too aware of how much taller Angel was, how much broader across the shoulders, as well as how much older. He might be able to pick a successful fight with younger vampires, but one as old as Angel? No, he had no chance. "I actually wouldn't recommend punching Angelus. He's likely to rip your head off and use it as a hand puppet."

He grimaced at the imagery. "Gee thanks."

He shrugged with strange nonchalance as he grabbed the doorknob. "Just giving you fair warning. No one knows my demon better than me."

"I'll remember to shoot from a distance," he assured him, following him out the door.

Giles and Naomi were waiting for them in the front office, each with their weapons of choice. Giles had chosen a sword - he called it a "gentlemen's weapon" -but he also had stakes and some magic up his sleeve. Naomi, who really didn't need much in the way of a weapon, still had a crossbow, and had been talking to Giles about looking into a compound "regular" bow. Naomi apparently was an archer "as a hobby", which struck Bren as really weird. He could see a lot of things as a hobby, up to and including internet porn, but archery? If it was Giles, he'd accept it, probably because Watchers seemed to know all that arcane stuff, and anyways, he was British. (Which also made no sense if he thought about it - what, did he think they were still in Robin Hood times or something?) But Naomi was Canadian, and that was more like British than American, and archery was probably better than any other hobby she could have come up with - curling, for example. What kind of sport involved brooms and bowling shoes? It was wrong on so many levels it was hard to know where to start. Canadians could be so weird … not that he'd ever say that to her or Logan. (What a choice - burned to a crisp or beaten to a pulp. But at least being Canadian, they'd apologize for doing it.)

He hadn't seen Angel grab any weapons, but he knew he had them, as he always did. He was just coy about it, because he was weird like that, and also just being a vampire made you a weapon. Bren was glad he hit Angel - well, no, he wasn't, but on the one hand he was, simply because it had distracted him. He thought he could handle this now, he thought he could do this; he wasn't even thinking about his mother …

Damn.

There was a rhythmic double knock on the door, and then it swung open, revealing the Weird Sisters standing just outside the jamb, smiling in that predatory, humorless way of theirs that made your balls retract so far inside your body you could taste them in the back of your throat. They continued to be fashion disasters, wearing combat boots, tan suede pants, black t-shirts with a weird green spider emblazoned on the front, and iridescent purple knee length coats that were probably rain slickers, but looked weird enough to have been cast offs from the Blade Runner wardrobe department. Their odd eyes were like empty glass. "Hello -"

"- daddy," they said in that annoying way of theirs.

Angel frowned at that, but a furtive guilt seemed to flash through his eyes. "I've asked you to stop calling me that, Belinda."

How did Angel tell them apart? Well, they knew when he was gone too - and when he was back - so maybe vampires had this thing, or at least there was some kind of "bond" between the sire and the sired. It was implied in some fiction, but Angel never admitted it; then again, he didn't like to talk too much about vampire things.

Giles scowled at the Weirds, as he hated bringing them into this. But Angel had been right earlier when he said that they were amongst the only people who would find the idea of overwhelming odds against them fun. "Sylvia -"

"- says -"

"- you owe -"

"- her two -"

"- for this one."

"But she is coming?" Angel prompted.

"Yes," they agreed in unison.

Not a one of them had met "Sylvia", but apparently she was an old friend of Angel's dating back to his earliest days in Los Angeles, although how he'd come to know this gargoyle was never explained, nor was their relationship explained either. She was an actual gargoyle; apparently they did exist, although they were virtually extinct on this world. They were hard to spot because most had Human guises - Sylvia's worked in the computer imagining department of Industrial Light and Magic, which seemed like a punch line - and they were indeed guardian demons, which put them at natural odds with other demons, so they weren't much liked in the community, and had all but retreated to the Human one in secret. But Angel and Sylvia were "kinda sorta" friends, although there was great reluctance on Sylvia's part. (Because he was a vampire?) But she was joining the battle. Bren had asked Giles why that was significant in any fashion, and Giles stared at him like he was dumber than Paris Hilton. "She's a gargoyle," he said, like that should have told him all he needed to know. Maybe it was, but he still didn't get it, and internet research had turned up nothing helpful. But at least the one thing he was able to accomplish today was the bringing in of the "big gun"; it made him feel a little less useless.

"Are we ready to go?" Angel asked, shrugging on his long black coat. He _always _had a long black coat.

"They're leading the way," Giles said, pointing at the Sisters in obvious distaste.

They smiled at him in a way that could only be called wolfish. "We -"

"- don't -"

"- bite … much."

Angel sighed wearily. "Just go. I'll meet you in the sewers."

"Yes-"

"- daddy," they replied, flashy creepy smiles before disappearing down the hall.

Bren tried to repress a shudder, but couldn't.

"They enjoy being creepy, don't they?" Naomi noted, not exactly making it a question.

"I think they get bored otherwise," Angel admitted ruefully, heading out the door.

There had been some talk about the Weirds. Supposedly they did what they did because of their love for Bob, and Angel admitted that the girls were smart enough that they knew it was in their best interest to side with a being who could destroy them utterly without getting up off the couch. But there was the possibility that Bob simply "pushed" them, and since, according to Giles, a push was nothing like telepathy, but an actual altering of reality (all of this always bracketed by Giles adding _"if he is who he says he is, the Fallen One," _- which was what apparently drai'shajan translated out to be _- _because in spite of what he had seen Giles just didn't trust Bob. Mainly because he was a Belial and they all lied, and no one knew what the power limit was on an old Belial anyways, since most didn't live long past a hundred. But Giles had admitted if he really was a fallen Power, the Powers had done an excellent job of using irony, because trapped in a Belial, no one would ever really believe he was who he said he was; the male version of Cassandra), there'd never be any way to tell. So his hope that there could be good-ish vampires without souls or potential divine intervention was pretty much dashed by this speculation. But he knew that already, didn't he? It was foolish to think a vampire could still hold on to any shred of humanity; he used to kill them! Who would know better than him?

Kier was playing him. But he wished sincerely he wasn't. He also hoped that he didn't show up tonight, because he didn't know what he'd do if he did.

* * *

He knew where he was, but he thought he'd just lay there for a moment and enjoy it.

Logan knew he was in the back seat of Marc's car (a brief flash of panic screamed through his mind - the bike! Where was it?), his head on Faith's thigh as she stroked his hair. It was a nice feeling, and he hated to wake up and ruin it.

Also he was eavesdropping, trying to figure out what had gone on in his "absence". Orbital's "Satan" was playing low on the car stereo, while Marc and Faith discussed their next move. Right now, they were speculating on why the hell the Org grunts were drugged, and with what. They all knew loads of drugs, but none that turned eyeballs yellow. "Could he have been wrong about it being drugs?" Faith wondered.

Now he had to speak up. "No," he muttered, turning his head so he could look directly up at her. "I know the smell of illness too, and none of those men were sick. Well, not in a physical way."

She gently scratched her fingernails across his forehead and into his hairline, and asked, "How long have you been awake?"

"Two seconds." A lie, but there was no way he was admitting it. He sat up, and saw through the windshield that they were idling before a red light at an intersection. The sun was going down, judging from the color of sky, which was a smoggy, rusty orange. He'd been out longer than he thought. "Where we headed?"

"Technically? Pasadena - we're hauling ass outta Burbank." Marc replied, giving him a casual glance in the rearview mirror.

"Doesn't everyone?"

"True, but we're trying to pick up the trail of the Mummy, and we're all playing catch up."

He just knew that was ominous. "They already hit again?"

"Yep. We started picking up radio traffic again. The Barstow cop car was found in a parking garage just within the Burbank city limits, but it was also found along with a jerked corpse in the ticket booth."

"Shit." He rubbed his eyes, but it was only out of habit. He felt great; he felt better than great. Something about being imbued with Bob's power left him feeling better than new, as if he'd been given a squeaky clean, factory mint body. "Did they steal a car?"

"You'd think, but they're not sure which one right now."

"Oh perfect." He then realized that that made Marc's current actions a little unfathomable. "So why are we headed to Pasadena?"

"Following the road out of Burbank," he explained. "Playing a hunch. But once we hit the L.A. city limits, I have no idea where we should start to look."

He felt Faith's hand on his arm. "You okay?"

He nodded, patting her hand. His hand was still smeared with blood, but at least it had dried. "I'm better than fine. Bob always puts me back together perfectly."

"Umm … how much can you control that, bud?"

Logan caught Marc's eye in the rearview mirror. "What, the Bob power? I can't, not really. I can use it for a few minutes before it overwhelms me and I shut down before I die."

Marc's look, even behind the goggles, was surprisingly skeptical. "Have you tried?"

He didn't like the implication in his tone. "No, I've been dicking around with it. What the fuck are you getting at?"

"We could use a little Bob power here and now; I don't see how we're gonna catch this guy without his help. Even the Org can't get a hold of this dude. Man, do you remember when these guys used to be a serious challenge? We must have really gutted 'em."

He shrugged, wondering if he should mention that Timebomb's clone and his "Black Fire" group did an awful lot of damage to them, but decided not to. And he knew he was right about needing Bob - they did, and quite badly, as they might not find him otherwise. But how could he handle the power for any length of time? He couldn't control it once it was triggered.

_(Had he ever really tried?)_

"Would Bob really give you so much power that you couldn't handle it?" Faith wondered, as if reading his mind. "I mean, I don't know the guy all that well, but I'd think he'd give you something you could use if you need to."

"The need to part might be the problem," Marc said. Logan kicked the back of the driver's seat hard. "Ow! Fuck, what are you, twelve! C'mon man, you and I both know you could handle it if you wanted to, maybe for a little bit, but you don't wanna."

"Fuck you! You don't have this power, you don't know what it's like!"

"No, but I know _you_. You're one of the most insanely stubborn, hard-headed guys I've ever met in my life, and you'd wrestle somethin' to death before givin' up. I don't think you're tryin' here, and I'm sure you've got your reasons, but don't tell me you _can't_."

He glared red hot molten death at him, but he knew Marc had him pegged. No, he hadn't tried, but no one should have that amount of raw power at their disposal. Especially not him; he could imagine what would happen if he got a rein on Bob's power. Would he ever stop changing things?

And there it was; his problem with the Bob power. He was afraid to touch it, so he tried not to. Why did Marc have to figure that out?

Faith squeezed his arm reassuringly, and gave him a faint smile. "You don't have to do anything you're uncomfortable with, Logan. We -"

"If -" Marc began.

But Faith cut him off with a deadly look of her own. "Contradict me and I'll kick your ass to La Jolla."

Marc sat up and glanced at her in the mirror, surprised and perhaps a little amused. "Yes ma'am."

She gave him a more sedate, concerned look. "We can find another way to do this. We always have before." Then, perhaps to lighten the mood, she scoffed and added, "Y'know, I still can't quite believe Bob is a god. I mean yeah, he's done some impossible things, but he talks like that "Crocodile Hunter" guy, wears leather pants, and owns a dive bar. What kinda god is that?"

A fair point, and one he'd wondered about, but here's what blew his mind: he actually had an _answer _now. "One who's turned his back on other gods. It was a choice between divinity and Humanity and for some reason he chose Humanity. But don't ask me why, 'cause that seems like a totally fucked up decision."

"That's Bob for ya," Marc pointed out. "He likes to do fucked up things."

He had a point there. But Marc was just full of points today, which was a bit distressing, but not atypical. Maybe he couldn't admit it to them, but the least he could do was admit it to himself. Had he ever really tried to channel the power properly? No - because it scared him. Because the power was a beast, a drug, and he could see himself getting addicted to it so very easily.

He could do anything he wanted. _Anything_. As Bob always said, no doors were closed to him, and for the first time they wouldn't be to Logan either. The idea was thrilling, orgasmic, and deeply, bone chillingly frightening. You only thought you controlled the power, but it controlled you. You would be its slave, and you wouldn't know it. Look what happened to Jean.

But it was time to stop being a chickenshit. He had to embrace the power and use it or more people were going to die. Why were the Org on drugs? Why was this mutant leaving a trail of desiccated corpses behind them?

Bob would know, or he'd figure it out easily. No doors were closed to him.

"Find me some Org guys," he told Marc. "They'll have some of the answers we need."

He nodded. "No problem."

Faith squeezed his arm again, her eyes so full of concern it was heartbreaking. What scared her more? His charging over the van and unleashing his rage on the grunts, or him looking up and showing that there was something else hiding inside him, something she didn't know? "You sure about this?"

He nodded, even though he wanted to say no. He wanted to say he was afraid he'd lose himself utterly, and if he embraced the power he'd never be happy inside his own sad skin again. But he wouldn't tell anyone that. "Yeah. I'm gonna concentrate for a moment, see if I can call it up. Don't be surprised if … uh …"

"You get the electric blue eyes again?" she prompted, giving him a sickly smile meant to be encouraging, but fear and trepidation warped it.

"Yeah." He leaned over and kissed her cheek, tasting the salt on her skin, aware that physical pleasure might seem hollow and pathetic once he really felt the power. But there was nothing he could do about that.

He sat back and closed his eyes, briefly considering meditating, but no, he'd had enough of that bullshit. He'd accessed the power once through visualization, so he decided to do that again now. He visualized empty, dark rooms - his mind - and he slammed through every door, bellowing, "Bob! Bob, get your fucking ass out here! I'm tired of this bullshit! We need to talk, now!"

It didn't seem to be working. He was stomping from one empty room to another, finding nothing (oh yeah, this was definitely his mind), and growing increasingly angry. Maybe Bob wanted him to think that this was some sort of personality fragment of his left in his mind to help him with the power, but he didn't think so. It was just like that time Jean entered his mind and used telekinesis to jump start his immune system: a psychic trail was left behind. And the "trail" in this case was actually a gossamer thread connecting him to Bob … wherever he was.

He slammed through yet another door …

… and suddenly found himself in the living room of Bob's Sydney house, although the lights were low enough that it took a moment for him to recognize it.

Bob was standing in front of the big bay window, his back to him, seemingly enjoying the view of the city lights at night over Sydney Harbor, the gem toned lights sparkling in the inky black water like foxfire. The view was technically impossible from here, but there were enough physical oddities about his home to clue you in to the fact that the Earth's laws of physics didn't apply here. "Tell me," he said, not turning around.

Logan stopped, his eyes now adjusted to the illumination. A good thing too, as another step and he would have walked straight into the coffee table. "Tell you what?"

"Why you're afraid of it. I'm not saying it isn't sensible, but I'm still curious."

He scowled at his back, aware it was totally wasted. "You know."

"I need to hear it from you."

A game with him - there was always a fucking game. He couldn't keep the anger from his voice, but he didn't even try. "No one should have this kind of power, Bob. How do you not use it? I could change reality just by wanting it, and do you know how much I _want_ it? I want to be living a peaceful life. I want to wake up tomorrow in Tokyo, with my legitimate businesswoman wife Mariko, and I want to forget about the Organization - which wouldn't exist anyways - and demons and gods and Xavier's, for fuck's sake. I don't want the world I live in now."

Bob turned now, his eyes giving off the slightest blue glow in the dark. "So why not change it?"

"Why? Who gave me the fucking right to play god? It'd be a better life for me, but what about everyone else? What if by living my happy life, Alex dies because I wasn't there when she needed me? Or Rogue? What if by making all the demons disappear I inadvertently kill Helga, Brendan, Angel, and maybe even Faith? What if someone still manages to open a Hellmouth in London anyways? What if Mariko realizes that, without the Yakuza threat, I'm not good enough for her? What kind of man would I even be? What if I couldn't live with the man I actually am?" His heart was pounding too fast and he felt an inexplicable lump in his throat, all of which just made him angrier. He didn't know whether to barf, cry, or beat the shit out of him. "No one should have so much fucking power that they actually contemplate that. And yet … I want it. I want to do it so badly I can hardly stand it, and I hate myself for wanting it. I didn't want your fucking power, Bob - I know what I'll do with it and I hate you for giving it to me and making me realize it. I'll be like Jean, but much worse. Take it _back_, you motherfucker; get rid of it before I'm rid of me."

Bob said nothing. After a moment, he simply crossed the room towards him, and even though he was the angry one, Logan thought for a moment that Bob was going to punch him. So he was extra startled when Bob took his head in his hands and gave him a firm kiss on the forehead. He was so shocked that when he let him go, all Logan could do was sputter, "What the fuck ..!"

"You are the perfect avatar," he told him. "You fear the power, and you should - no Human was meant to have it. Others would give in and act out their wildest fantasies, but you respect the consequences, the unpredictable fallout of remaking the world in your own image. You understand why I don't."

"No I don't," he snapped. "I told you if you give me the power I will use it. We need the power now, but I need you to help me keep from abusing it. 'Cause I will."

"You won't."

"The fuck I won't! Don't you understand how weak I am? Given half a chance I'll make the Jean-Camaxtli debacle look like a church picnic. I'm a chickenshit, Bob, a coward. The others don't know it - okay, maybe Marc has a clue - but there are so many things I want to do over again, things I want to make right. I'm the opposite of a saint. I will alter life as we know it, and I don't know if I'll remember enough to even feel guilty about it later on. There's something in me that can't be allowed anywhere near that power."

The look Bob gave him was almost wry. "There's something in us all, _especially_ in the gods. I don't know if you've noticed, but Humans can't get anywhere near the bloodthirsty desires of the gods. You're all pure amateur hour - you should know that by now."

He shook his head, frustrated by all of this. He'd said his piece, but he felt no better; if anything, he felt even more bereft. There was nothing worse than taking a good, hard look at yourself and being totally fucking repulsed. "Bob - help me, and then come back and take it away from me. Do you understand? We do this, and I want it gone."

"You think it works like that? It's not like I'm not _trying_ to reincorporate as fast as possible; I'm missing some killer waves off Bondi."

Logan glared at him, and wondered if he could hit Bob in a mindscape that he controlled. "You're not taking me seriously."

"Oh bloody hell, mate, of course I am. I just think you're underestimating yourself very badly. But fine. You want to use this, I'll help you hold back the thoughts and feeling of others, I'll help you do what you need to do. But I think you'd be surprised at what you can do by yourself, if you just extended yourself a modicum of trust."

He turned away, shaking his head again, walking towards the kitchen archway. There was no door there, and yet he was pretty sure that's where he came in. "Save the feel good bullshit for later, when I'll probably need it."

"You know, when most people are offered power, they do what Jean did," Bob said after him, not following but not leaving him alone either. "They say "Yes please". You're one of the first people I've ever encountered who actually pushed away from the table and said no. See what I mean? You're quite refreshing."

"Blow it out your ass," he snarled, stomping into the kitchen.

Darkness followed, along with a faint but growing blue light that came along with a wave of warmth, and not so much a sense of dizziness but a sense of falling inside his own head, plunging into an endless abyss.

When he opened his eyes, he felt hollow but boiling with energy, aware of the feelings and thoughts of others but they just washed by him unnoticed, a wave of water that was simple background noise unless he chose to look at it closely. He didn't.

The music was still low, but had switched to Megadeth, probably at Faith's request. Logan caught a glance of himself in the rearview mirror, and while the energy wasn't bleeding from his sockets, his pupils were a vibrant, deep neon blue that seemed to have sparks embedded deep within its cells. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Faith giving him a startled glance.

Through the windshield, he saw Marc was tailing a very familiar looking style of black van, and they were coming up on a traffic light. Marc spared him a glance. "Good, you're awake. I'm thinkin' of rear ending them."

"No need," he told him, then added, "Light." The green traffic signal instantly switched to red.

Faith gasped. "Did you just _do_ that?"

"Bob did; same difference," he told her, opening the car door and stepping out onto the street. In his head, Bob was singing, _"How do you do, my name is trouble -"  
_

The cars behind them and in the neighboring lane honked at him, but he muttered, "Shut up," and the car horns all suddenly died. Coincidence? No, probably not.

He walked right up to the side of the Org van, idling at the extra long stoplight, and wondered where he should start. So many minds to wring dry, so little time.


	7. Chapter 7

7

He, Naomi, and Giles piled in Giles's eminently sensible car, and started the drive down to San Pedro. Because traffic promised to make it long, they decided that everyone would get a half hour to listen to the kind of music they liked on the car stereo. Giles went first, as he was the driver, and they listened to opera, which almost killed them. Naomi's choice was Coldplay, as innocuous as all get out, but it still annoyed Giles. So when his choice of music came around - Ladytron - he got dirty looks in the rearview mirror. Goddamn it, it was a good album! And it wasn't punk or heavy metal or something.

Once again, they parked away from the site of the battle, but this time they had an even better reason for doing it - they were meeting up with people. They waited at the docks, generally in view of part of the estate, at least to them; it would be nearly impossible for anyone to see them from the house or grounds, unless they were in one of the trees.

The first ones to show up - with a slight "whoomph!" - was Rags and a woman who must have been Sylvia, because he didn't recognize her, and she didn't exactly smell Human. But she looked so Human Bren wondered if Angel was having a bit of fun with them.

She looked Asian, maybe thirty five, on the short side of average, neither thin nor fat but somewhere in between, her body so linear she seemed to have no curves at all. She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, no jacket, petite in proportions, neither wildly attractive or horribly ugly; she was just average, almost straight down the middle. So she was supposed to be some big fucking deal? She really didn't look it.

And poor Rags looked like he'd drank too much, or not enough, fine lines bunching in the corners of his crystal eyes while bags appeared beneath. He was wearing black surfer jams (it was still too goddamn hot) and a very thin white "wife beater" tank top, all of which showed off the extent of his tattoos. He not only had entire "sleeves" of twining black vines up and down his arms, but they ran down both his legs as well, ending on the tops of his currently bare feet. There were dark shadows beneath his tank top, more tattoos, although they looked like they had different shapes. Were the tattoos necessary to his "high priest" position? Rags had never been clear on that, and he hadn't seen anyone else amongst the staff with tattoos, although the vine theme was a common one in the motif of the church itself. Still, he knew there were special protection "runes", ones he didn't quite get, and it was possible that Rags got them put on his body either out of need or devotion.

Sylvia was terse and not very warm, giving the impression she really didn't want to know Angel's Human friends. As it was, all the awkwardness was broken when Helga showed up. Even though she couldn't get too close to the place due to the security system and guards, she had done some reconnaissance and had some news to report. Hel wasn't part of the original game plan, but she overheard him talking to Rags in the bar, and offered her services. Angel figured one more person couldn't hurt, especially Helga, the world's toughest bartender. She was wearing her bar outfit, a black tank top and loose black linen pants - all of which made for an excellent reconnaissance outfit, he realized in retrospect - and a big tank on her back, which must have been her weapon. As she explained where there attack would have to come from, and where the "weaknesses" in the defenses had to be deliberate, Giles gave her a funny look. "You've done this before," he said, a question that wasn't a question.

She shrugged. "Not this in particular, but I've attacked well defended compounds before. One is pretty much like all the others."

Bren could tell Giles wanted to pursue this, but he was glad he didn't, as he didn't know how Giles would take Helga's former "career" as an assassin for a New York based demon mob. It wasn't like that was a choice she made or anything - family obligations and all - but Giles had enough problems working with Logan, and he hadn't been an assassin by choice either (although his involved brainwashing, meaning it was even less his choice than Helga's). Then again, maybe the fact that she was a demon, and assassinated other demons, would be more acceptable to him. What did Watchers do but kill demons?

Angel and the Sisters finally showed up as the last rays of the sun sunk below the horizon, the sky turning a deep, smog induced dark crimson (and that stupid mnemonic ran through his head: _"Red sky at night, sailor's delight" _- what did that even mean?), and Helga showed him the stake out diagram she'd sketched on the back of a bar napkin, and told Angel that even though there was an obvious security gap on the right flank of the property, it was _too_ obvious - in her opinion, it was a trap. She wanted to storm the property through the front gate, as she didn't think they'd be expecting that. Angel considered it a moment, and agreed.

As they started off, Rags disappeared, as he needed to get something (he'd come back; if he didn't, Hel would cut off his tab forever), and Sylvia stayed to the back of the group. Hel patted him on the back, and asked, "You okay, kid?"

What, was it plastered on his forehead? "Yeah, I'm good. Just a little nervous."

Her look was deeply skeptical, but she must have figured now was not the time to talk about it. "Wanna come with me? I'm gonna sneak around."

"No, that's okay. I'm part of the advance team here."

"Are we expecting someone else?"

"Huh?"

"You keep looking around."

"Just waiting for Rags," he lied. Maybe Kier wouldn't show up; that would be good. Maybe it was too close to sundown for him to be out yet. He was a new vampire - well, newish - and probably didn't know yet how close he could cut it, unlike Angel and the Weirds, who'd had a century or so to work that out.

Helga snorted in disbelief. "Yeah, like Rags would _ever _move that fast. Not even during happy hour. " Something about the look she was giving him suggested she didn't quite believe him. But he was just being paranoid, right?

She patted him on the back, and told him, "Keep your mind in the game; don't worry about anyone else. Lose your focus, and it could be fatal." She walked off, into the growing dark, and he wondered if it was a certain look on his face. He let out his demon side, just in case. It was safer anyways.

A long drive led up to huge wrought iron black gates, and even though Naomi shorted out the electronic lock and the cameras and other security tech up front, the gate was still firmly locked. The Sisters walked ahead of them, and in unison kicked either side of the gate. The lock broke with a loud, metallic snap, and pieces of it fell to the asphalt as the gates swung open and the girls just walked on in. "Hello -"

"- anybody -"

"- home? We're -"

"- here to -"

"- spread the news -"

"- about Scientology."

"We don't want to scare them off," Angel mock scolded them.

Bren couldn't help but laugh. He had no idea the Weirds even had a sense of humor, but judging from their wardrobe, maybe that should have been obvious.

The house on the estate was huge; it was definitely a mansion, huge and slightly rococo, with fake pillars and a huge front porch that could hold an entire squadron of cops. It was empty now, but Bren's flesh crawled - someone was watching them.

There had been dim lights leading up the driveway, but now huge spotlights came on near the house, illuminating the grounds in a bright flash of white that seemed to be the equivalent of sunlight, and made Angel and the Sisters briefly cringe. "I thought you were coming around back," a voice called out through a megaphone. There, on the porch, was a man with a paunch, dressed in khaki pants and a white long sleeved shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the collar open. He had hair so pale blond it was almost invisible, and his eyes were so pale blue they were almost grey. "Not that it isn't nice to see you, Angel. We've been waiting a long time for this, in fact."

"Who's we?" he shouted back. Everyone froze where they were, as it seemed safest.

People started coming around from the back grounds. People who mainly smelled like vampires, only they rattled and light reflected off of them as they moved, and he could see why - they were wearing shirts of chainmail, just the shirt, a fine mesh that gleamed and clinked, and there were dozens upon dozens of vampires in full game face, men and women, including, much to his shock, the busty redheaded vamp who broke his neck back in that mausoleum quite a while ago. He felt his gut twist, and wondered if it was an omen of some sort; his mother was dead, and now here was the woman who had "killed" him. Maybe death was trying to send him a message that some people were destined to die, no matter how hard they tried to hang on.

"You think you shut down one production studio, you shut down the industry?" The man continued through his megaphone. He had a very faint German accent that sounded like an affectation more than something real. This must have been Uli, the director, which also explained his megaphone. "Actually, you helped us out by getting rid of some of the competition, and for that we thank you. But we wanted to send you a message, Angel, and that is we will not tolerate an attack on our own."

The vampires in chainmail filled both sides of the front lawn, snarling at them, and he muttered to Giles, "Stakes aren't going to get through the mail, are they?"

"That is the point of them," Giles replied dryly.

Bren slowly reached for his gun, aware that a bullet wouldn't kill a vampire, but a head shot would slow them down a great deal.

"Oh, and these lights are run on solar batteries, in case your electric friend gets any ideas."

As if on cue, the lights flickered and died. Naomi was crouched down, hands on the ground, and electric blue energy limned her hands. "Doesn't matter," she said. "It's all energy."

"Hey scarecrow," Helga said, appearing on the left side of the lawn. She hefted what looked like a small hose up in her hands, and aimed the nozzle at that group of vampires. "How 'bout a little fire?" She turned something on the nozzle, and a stream of fire vomited from the hose and splattered all over the first row of vampires, who screamed and flailed and evoked pure chaos. "Wow, those things aren't fireproof, huh?"

What kind of woman owned her own flamethrower? Well, Bob was a weapons dealer, so maybe that explained everything, if simply her being Helga didn't.

The vampires on the other side of the lawn bellowed a war cry and swarmed towards them, some producing weapons of their own (some stakes, some knives, some swords - no guns, which was a good thing), and a bolt of electricity shot out and knocked down a good chunk of the ones in the middle. Giles pulled something out of his pocket and said something in Latin before lobbing a small round object into the swarm. It seemed to burst in a huge flash of achingly bright light with no noise at all, except the subsequent screams of vampires spontaneously dusting - the "sunlight" spell he was talking about with Angel before the Sisters showed up.

He took aim and shot a couple of vamps in the head, making them go down like Anna Nicole Smith on a bender, but stuff started whizzing past his head, and he didn't know what it was until one sliced into his temple on its way past. Shit, they had crossbows too? No fucking fair!

The Sisters were cutting through the crowd of vampires like chainsaws, Angel suicidally following them into the melee, as Helga continued to blast other vamps with gouts of flame, making them burn into dust. Giles had taken out his sword and was fighting with some of the vampires, and simply hacking the heads off others, dusting them. Bren kept looking for the redhead, but he didn't see her; perhaps Giles or Helga had gotten her.

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned, thinking someone was trying to flank them, but it was Sylvia, crouching down on the driveway. He thought for a moment that maybe she'd taken an arrow or something, but suddenly her back seemed to … bubble, and huge leathery wings suddenly popped out, black veins like cables visible through thin black skin as her wings spread out to nine feet in length. The rest of her changed soon, and her clothes didn't rip; they _disappeared_. What, had it been a part of her? She changed all over; suddenly she had granite like greenish black skin and a lumpy face with a distended jaw and a forehead that seemed to bulge out like a shelf, her eyes glowing embers beneath the shadow of her brow. She didn't look remotely humanoid now; her feet were like huge eagle talons, and her hands ended in gnarled claws. Even the tip of her wings seemed to have small claws at the very end, ones that flexed as she stood up and shot straight up into the air, making a noise that sounded like the combination of a roar of a lion and the caw of a crow. She was much larger than she was in her Human form, maybe seven feet in length, and she swooped down, a dark, lethal shadow, that grabbed clutches of vampires as arrows bounced harmlessly off her skin, and the vampires dropped screaming to the ground as she swooped up, their chainmail shirts still caught in her claws.

So that was a gargoyle. Neat. No wondered she was supposed to be a big noise.

He was out of bullets so he popped the empty clip, but before he could slam a new clip in, a vampire lunged at him. He turned aside, slamming him on the back of the head with the gun butt, but even as he ate driveway, another came in and tossed off a kick he saw coming and blocked with his forearm, throwing a kick of his own that caught the vamp straight in the nuts (hey, they were hopelessly outnumbered; dirty fighting was allowed). He went down, but some vamp bitch who still had her chainmail threw a punch that caught him on the back of the head and sent him reeling.

He hadn't seen Kier yet, but the crowd was so large - and half of it was now on fire - it was almost impossible to tell if he was here or not. Whether he was or wasn't seemed kind of irrelevant now; it had clearly been a trap. They had been prepared for them.

Which meant Kier had set them up. Damn it. Was it too much to ask that he could meet a nice guy in this town who didn't want to kill him?

* * *

He owed it to Marc and Faith to fill them in, but he almost didn't want to.

Yes, there had been more going on than they realized, but he still hadn't expected what he was told. He was torn between being sick and being angry, and had to settle for a little of both.

He got back in the car as the light went to green and traffic resumed, a knotty tangle that guaranteed they'd cover five miles within the next hour. Faith and Marc both looked at him expectantly as he slammed the door. "Well?" Marc prompted.

Logan sighed, his head not so much pounding but pulsing, not a painful feeling but an odd and uncomfortable one. "The mutant we're after is a guy named Jeremy Kimball, but there's some debate among the grunts whether he's a natural mutant or an experiment. Either way, he has a problem related to his genetic structure - namely, it's in constant flux, and to survive he has to "borrow" other peoples'."

"Like Rogue?" Marc wondered.

"In a way, Except when he borrows other people's DNA, they get his damage. They die so he can live. And he's in decline, so he has to borrow more and more, faster and faster. They believe that eventually he'll have to kill someone every fifteen minutes to keep from total collapse."

Faith hissed under her breath. "Jesus. And some of 'em think the Organization did this to him on _purpose_? What for?"

"It made him the perfect killer," Marc replied, his tone of voice edged with disgust. "He doesn't have to be brainwashed to do it, or blackmailed, or paid. He has to kill if he wants to keep living."

She shook her head. "That's just sick."

"How do the drugs come into it?" Marc asked.

"It seemed to interfere briefly with Kimball's absorption process. The problem was it was a major league psychotropic that seriously altered body chemistry, so the soldiers were only to shoot up with it if engagement with the target was immediately eminent. So we can assume that those guys who tried to reenact the end of The Wild Bunch with the Barstow PD shot up the drug in hopes they'd get him, but when they didn't immediately, they went all loopy."

Marc grunted in ill humor, while Faith shook her head in disgust. "So how do we find this guy?" She wondered.

Logan hated to do it, but he was forced to shrug. "They had no idea. They don't think he's going anywhere, just running to a big city where there's lots of people, and a few who go missing won't be noticed so much."

"Shit." Faith tapped her fingers on her leg, and there was something in her body posture that suggested unease. Even though he told Bob he did _not_ want to read her or Marc's mind - there were some privacy issues that should not be crossed between friends, no matter what Xavier and Bob thought - he knew what she was going to say before she said it. "We're gonna have to kill him, aren't we? Is there a … cure for his condition?"

"Not that anyone's aware of."

"We don't really have a choice here," Marc commiserated. "He's going to keep killing 'cause he has to, and if the Org get him back, they have an unparalleled killing machine. If we can figure out where he is, I brought my sniper rifle. I can drop him and we'll be done."

"There's another way," Logan said, and almost couldn't believe he was saying it. But he was doing it for Faith, not for himself. As far as he was concerned, he'd killed too many civilians; Kimball was better off dead. Still, he didn't want to pull her into this since it bothered her so much. Kimball should get down on his knees and grovel at Faith's feet, as she was the only one keeping him alive.

Marc looked at him sharply in the rearview mirror. "And what way is that?"

"Bob can take care of him. He thinks he can also find him."

Bob, who had been singing quietly to himself in the back of his mind, finally spoke up. _Yeah, but I told you it would hurt._

_I can take pain. Just do it._

Bob told him he got enough of a sense of Kimball in the minds of the grunts to possibly track him down, but to do it took a lot of energy, and it would probably be a little "damaging" to his "frame". Logan didn't honestly care; he just wanted to get this over with, stop this abomination before he hurt anyone else to save his measly skin. "Give me a second," he told them, closing his eyes.

He had no words for what actually occurred. There was a feeling like a ball of fire burning its way through his cerebral cortex, and images flashed inside his eyelids faster than he could focus on any of them. But he did get the impression he was looking at the city from high above the ground, but not airplane height - maybe bird height, within the airspace of a sparrow. Streets flashed by as rivers of hard gray, people and cars a blurs, the occasional plant and tree a far more colorful smear. Logan couldn't really feel himself, although he had the impression he was grabbing on to the side of his head, as if trying to block out a disturbing noise, and he was pounding the heel of his right foot against the floor, as if trying to stomp the pain away. It did hurt, but so much and so strangely his body had no way to correctly interpret it; the pain didn't even imprint on his nerves, just slid away like oil filled with shards of broken glass, slicing on its way down.

And then this mental/astral projected slideshow stopped at what looked like a mall parking lot, the sky a bloody, smog occluded red. He was there; he knew he was there. Bob could feel him, and so too could Logan, although he didn't understand how. No matter - Bob had a location, and that was all he needed.

" - gan!" he heard as he opened his eyes, Faith shouting his name as she shook him. "Can you hear me?"

"Yeah, yeah," he said, jerking his arm out of her grip reflexively. "I'm fine." He felt sweat pouring down his lips and chin, and from the look of wide eyed horror on Faith's face, he suddenly knew it wasn't sweat.

"Oh shit," she gasped, looking around for something. She grabbed the bottom edge of his shirt, muttering, "It's fucked anyways," and ripped off a portion that was mostly not bloody. "Tilt your head back," she ordered, wadding up the scrap of fabric and shoving it under his nose. He did as she said, mainly because he felt as fragile as spun glass, full of heat and nothingness, and he could taste his own blood, hot and metallic and salty, running down his throat.

_We should take a break._

_No! I'm healing; I can feel it. Let's get this done._

Bob sighed. _You're too damn stubborn for your own good._

He wasn't telling him something he didn't know.

"What happened?" she asked him, still holding the wad of torn cotton beneath his nose. He didn't even need to look at it to realize it was already sodden; Faith's pained look of concern told him everything he needed to know.

"It's just an after-effect," he said, and wondered if it was a lie. He really didn't know. His brain continued that weird pulsing, as if was breathing, expanding to push up against the walls of his skull and retreating once again. That wasn't a feeling he'd miss anytime soon. "We're gonna go," he told them, glancing at Marc in the mirror, shifting to look at Faith. "We'll be right back."

Her brows lowered severely over her eyes, skepticism and concern and rage mingling in equal measure. "What? You can't go anywhere. You got blood gushing out your nose like you've severed an artery, and so many blood vessels ruptured in your eyes they look like they're bleeding too."

_Ouch._

"You know me; I heal. I'll be okay." He touched her face, fingers sliding along her cheek, leaving a small smear of fresh blood. His? Must have been. She looked severely unconvinced, but he didn't want a further discussion; he mentally commanded Bob to take them to Kimball.

Teleportation with Bob was different. It wasn't a violent thing like it was with Rags, a forced tear in reality that spit them out somewhere else. No, everything seemed to part for him, willingly and gently, reality opening up and welcoming them like they belonged everywhere and every when at once, a natural part of the time stream. In a single second, he went from looking at Faith while seated in the back of Marc's rental Jag to standing in a strip mall parking lot somewhere east of Pasadena, the wind full of exhaust and smoke; the fire season had started. It seemed ironic somehow. Nature was destroying itself, following the lead of the people within it.

Logan searched the parking lot, sniffing the air and parsing it for a familiar Human scent, as Bob sang in his head, _The world will make a dream and a prayer out of our bones - _

A woman walking to her car cast a funny look at him, and he supposed in his bloody, torn shirt, his nose gushing blood, he looked quite a sight, like a fight or accident victim. But she didn't stop walking, and didn't look at him very long. It was amazing how looking like you needed help made you instantly invisible to most people.

Kimball was hiding behind a huge ass Lincoln Navigator, watching the woman as she strolled to her Range Rover; his look wasn't so much curious as predatory. "It's over, Jeremy," he told him.

He jumped as if he got a cattle prod in the spine, and spun around with a sort of panicky desperation in his face and posture. He was a man in his early thirties with a lean but soft body, brown hair like mud splattered haphazardly on his scalp, his eyes the color of water. He smelled like cancer and fear, anger and paranoia and dried blood. "You - you're one of them," he said, approaching him with his hand out like he wanted to shake hands. But that wasn't what he wanted to do.

"Freeze," he said, and Jeremy did, the look in his eyes suggesting that he didn't understand why he couldn't move anymore. "I'm not Organization; I'm worse. I know you can't help but do what you do, but I still want to kill you. Don't you think when thirty people have to die for you to get through the day, it's time to give it up? Didn't that ever occur to you?"

Tears brimmed in his eyes, and Bob let up on him just enough to speak. "I - I don't wanna die," he croaked, the first tears spilling over the lids, sliding down his cheek. They were tinged pinkish with blood; the genetic breakdown was starting once more.

Logan was repulsed by his selfishness, his willingness to kill another person to give himself another fifteen minutes of life, but Bob reminded him that the survival instinct was innate, inborn in everything, from the highest mammal to the lowest virus._ And just because you were willing to kill yourself for less doesn't mean anyone else would._

Logan grimaced at the reminder of his own weakness, of his own fragility and failure, and wondered what he was going to do with this pathetic wretch of a man. And then what he was going to do with himself.

8

Brendan found himself overwhelmed quickly, but he knew from experience - and from the hand to hand combat advice of Logan, Saddiq, and Helga (they all agreed on this point) - that you couldn't panic. You had to keep fighting, until you cleared a spot or until you went down for good, but the key was you couldn't give up. The moment you gave up was the moment you lost, and Logan could tell him several real life anecdotes to prove it. Of course he could heal from anything up to anti-ballistic missile fire, so he didn't think that was a fair comparison.

He dropped the empty gun and pulled the knife out of its sheath, holding the hilt in his palm and letting the blade stick out between his fingers, a bargain basement replication of one of Logan's claws, and as a vampire came in to throw a punch, he dodged it and mimicked a Logan move he'd seen a dozen times before, slashing across the vampire's throat. It was one of their adamantium knives, but cutting off a head with a knife took more strength than he had realized, and what he had really done was slashed open his throat. But the vampire was shocked enough to stagger back wide eyed, and Bren turned, lashing out blindly with the knife, cutting a few vamps across the face and eyes, making them back off.

An arrow punched through his shoulder, a sharp pain that made him hiss, and he buried the knife in the soft midsection of a vampire whose chainmail shirt had ridden up, and he tore sideways, eviscerating him. No, it couldn't kill 'em, but damn if it wasn't debilitating.

Someone grabbed him by the arrow in his shoulder and twisted, a pain so sharp and sudden he couldn't help but scream, and then he felt cold hands twist his arm high behind his back, the strain so great in his muscle and tendons he dropped the knife. "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" a voice purred in his ear.

Oh holy shit, it was the redhead.

He felt cold steel pressed up against his own throat, and while he was positive it wasn't adamantium, a slashed throat would kill him good. He could feel her breasts pressing up against his back, enough that he knew they were fake (and she wasn't wear mail - too bad he hadn't seen her first). "Oh yes, didn't I kill you already?"

"Must've been someone else," he said through gritted teeth. He could elbow her, but the problem was she could just rip the knife aside while falling backwards, and that would be that. If he was Logan or Saddiq, he wouldn't care; if he was Helga, he'd have a spare tail to disarm her. But he was him, and therefore fucking useless.

She started dragging him off to the side, heading towards the house, the blade of the knife starting to bit into his neck. "Let's see how much your friends value you, huh?"

She was going to use him as a bargaining tool then? Get everyone to drop their weapons? They probably would, and then they'd all be killed. He sighed, aware that he had been right about the redhead being a premonition of death. He blinked back tears as he realized he was just going to have to take one for the team. It was him or all of them, and it wasn't a choice at all.

He could see what he had to do in his mind. In one of the self-defense classes at Xavier's, Logan had shown them a couple of different ways to get out of an arm lock, although it only applied to when they didn't have a weapon pressed against your throat. With his perfect memory he could see it with crystal clarity, and he hoped that Helga burned this bitch to ground before the night was through.

He slammed his head back hard into her face, and slipped his foot behind her ankle, tripping her, his eyes closed as he braced for the feel of the blade slitting open his throat.


	8. Chapter 8

He felt the cold metal slice into his skin, followed by the warm flush of blood, but then she screamed behind him, the unearthly screech of a vampire being dusted as the knife fell away to the ground.

He slapped a hand over the wound in his throat, which was spreading warmth down the front of his shirt, and turned to see who had saved him perhaps a second too late.

Bren's shock was so great, he wasn't sure what he was seeing for a moment. Standing behind him, a broken branch in his hand, was Kier. "That was Raven, the bitch who turned me," he explained. He looked closer at his throat wound, and frowned in concern. "Huh. That's bleeding good, but it looks like it didn't hit anything major."

Okay. What was going on? "You set us up," he pointed out.

He grimaced, almost rolling his eyes. "Yeah, they tracked me down and said if I did this they'd leave me alone. But I knew that was bullshit, and I figured that this Angel guy would be smart enough to know it was a trap, so maybe all these fuckers could get their stupid asses killed." Kier looked around suspiciously. "He did _know_ this was a trap, right?"

"We figured as much, yeah. So you double crossed us to double cross them?" He was trying to make sense of this in his head, but that didn't sound right.

Kier looked confused, and while he was thinking about it, a vampire sprawled at his feet and hopped back up with a growl. Kier simply staked him in the back and dusted him while continuing to think, as if the whole thing was barely worth his notice. "Umm … I'm not sure that's quite right … but something like that."

"You couldn't have dropped us a hint?"

He stared at him in disbelief. "I thought it was pretty obvious."

"And you could be lying to save your own ass."

Now he looked honestly perplexed. "I wasn't lying to you, Bren. I do like you."

Was that what was bothering him? He didn't know. But now wasn't the time to exchange mash notes, as the fight raged on around them, and he was nearly hit by a flying vampire, who landed hard on her back, her teeth broken and blood dribbling from a shredded lip. She got up, looked fearfully at her tormentors - it seemed the Sisters were playing volleyball with her (had no one ever told them not to play with their food?) - and ran off into the night, assuming discretion was the better part of getting your ass handed to you on a silver platter. It seemed the Sisters were now wearing chainmail shirts, which they presumably stripped off previous victims.

Kier attempted to look towards the house, but with the roiling crowd and the fact that many were on fire as well as the fact that there was a big gargoyle still using diving attacks, they didn't have the best view. "Is Uli still alive?"

He had no idea. "I think so."

"Good. I'm gonna kill that fat bastard," Kier snarled, morphing into vamp face and diving into the crowd, heading towards the house.

He felt slightly dazed, but he found a knife on the ground and picked it up, not sure if it was his or Raven's. Blood continued soaking into his shirt, dripped when he bent down, but it wasn't gushing or spewing, so he was probably going to live. The scary thing - or maybe it was just the disappointing thing; he wasn't sure - is that he was sorry he wasn't going to die. He was just going to have to live with things and deal with them, whether he liked it or not.

He decided to pretend he was Saddiq (or Logan really - they had pretty much the same attitude about fighting: you fought until your enemy was gone, or you were gone, but either way you just kept digging yourself out of the hole or straight into the grave), and the first vamp that rushed him got the knife straight in the eye, making him stop with a startled noise, like he couldn't quite believe what had just happened. He kicked him in the gut, sending the vamp back while also yanking the knife out of his eye socket with a sickening wet noise, and turned and slashed, catching another one straight across the face. He shut down his emotions and simply let his body fight, because it could, and it was better that way.

One threw a kick and he caught its leg, yanking him forward and kicking his other leg out from under him, sending him falling hard onto his back. Another threw a punch, but he caught her fist and twisted under it, snapping her arm and shoving her face first into the crowd. He had a little movie of moves playing in his mind - Logan, Saddiq, Angel, and just a tad of Jet Li - and his body could replicate the moves with great precision, although it varied depending on the angle he initially saw it from. But it was the good part about remembering every single fucking thing you ever saw, heard, or read.

Even over all the screaming, dusting, burning, and various battle noises (thuds, grunts, clashing steel), he though he heard a familiar reverse "whoomp", and he looked to the front gates to see Rags had come back. He'd gotten rid of his shirt, though, revealing his small beer gut and the strange, intricate patterns tattooed all over his torso, some of them vines but most of them not. Rags pulled something off his back and kneeled down, so the mirror shield he brought with him was almost totally blocking the view of him. He could vaguely hear his somewhat jarring Cockney voice, but couldn't quite make out what he was saying over the general din. Not that it mattered; he knew what he was doing.

It was easy to forget what Rags was. He seemed to be a chronic alcoholic, a strangely quiet and vaguely sad man with an almost indecipherable accent and a love of intricate tattoos, a gentle soul who claimed to be a priest and lived over a taco stand. It was easy to forget that Rags not only _was_ a priest, but a very special one; a hierophant with an ability that made him devastatingly powerful. Maybe he was a Cockney drunk, an easily overlooked bit of L.A. eccentricity, but he could do something that almost no one else could do: he could talk to his gods, and they would actually _listen_. And his gods were extremely wrathful, and very protective of their followers.

Someone figured out what he was doing and what that mirror shield actually meant, and shouted, "Stop him! Stop that Persaid!" But they knew that might happen, and had all stayed near the front to form a protective barrier between Rags and the crowd. Helga swept the flamethrower back and forth, like she was watering a garden, and it kept the vampires at bay quite well while the rest of them started backing up, towards Rags.

The Sisters weren't the only ones who thought of donning the enemy's gear - Angel too was wearing a chainmail shirt, so the three of them looked like a bunch of Renfesters who had taken a seriously wrong turn on their way to the joust. Angel was bleeding from a cut cheek, but was now wielding the bloody machete that had probably done the damage before Angel ripped it out of the assailant's hand and used it to chop his head off. Giles looked the worse for wear, as he had a rather nasty looking gash on his right upper arm, which was bleeding so much that he'd switched his sword to his left hand, a split lip, and his left eye was red and starting to go puffy, the warning signs of a future black eye. But he had to give the guy credit, as he was still hanging in there, and he was far from dead yet. Even the Sisters and Naomi looked a tad mussed; of them all, only Hel and her wall of fire were untouched. But, again, she had the flamethrower. The only thing that trumped that was machine gun (and thankfully, nobody brought one of those).

Something started to happen, but it was hard to immediately quantify what. It was like the atmosphere started to change, a charge filling the air like ozone before a thunderstorm, and his hair stood on end while his skin prickled. From the look of shock and horror on the faces of the standing vampires, they felt it too, and they knew it was bad. Very, very bad.

"Run!" one shouted, and it sounded like the guy who had shouted the initial warning. But it was too late to run, and much of the crowd seemed confused, almost struck dumb, as though they didn't have the merest inkling of what was about to happen.

They all fell even with Rags or got behind him, even Hel, and he saw, out of the corner of his eye, something manifest on Rags's mirror shield. He knew he wasn't supposed to look, but he couldn't help but give it a sidelong glance. There were his gods, the beings of his half-heartedly adopted new religion, and he wasn't quite prepared for what he saw. They were gorgeous, three beautiful women, so lovely they took his breath away, even though their eyes were closed and a thick black stripe was painted across each of their faces, covering their eyes. Their names popped into his head - Euryale the wanderer, Sthenno the warrior, and Medusa the ruler - but he didn't know which was supposed to be which. Maybe Medusa was the one in front, and Sthenno and Euryale were standing behind her; after all, the one in front had bright green hair, brighter than Helga's, while the one on the right had hair as red as blood, and the other had hair as black as space. And their hair looked like hair, not snakes, but it was … moving. Not like in a breeze, but like it was getting restless; tendrils twined along the side of their necks, across their face, entangled in each other's as the strands of hair reached out, groping like a blind man trying to feel his way around an unfamiliar room. He felt riveted to the spot, and so must have the vampires, as they all looked like they had frozen in their tracks, wanting to move but perfectly unable to.

Giles grabbed him and hissed, "Don't look!" He physically turned him so they were both looking at a palm tree on the other side of the yard, and he couldn't help but note how weak Giles's grip was on the right side. He probably needed to get his arm looked at before he lost all ability to use it.

Something happened; it felt like a dam of tension had burst, and he closed his eyes as he knew the Gorgons must have opened theirs. There was a flash of light, not so much bright (although it was - it seemed to burn afterimages into his retinas, in spite of the fact that his eyes were closed) as something almost physical, a tangible burst of pressure, and then it all went away as quickly as it had occurred.

He opened his eyes almost reluctantly, although the sense of the charge was gone too. He turned, looking towards the house, and it was nothing but a field of ash, the lawn rendered a sooty moonscape. He hadn't even heard them dust. Maybe they turned to stone and then dusted, crumbling like ancient statues too brittle to stand against gravity.

There was a body on the porch, though, and even from here he could tell it was Uli, the wooden shaft of an arrow sticking out of his heart. So he was Human, or just another form of demon? It could have been an accident, a shot that went wild … or it was simply meant to look that way. Was Kier one of the piles of ash? He wasn't sure if he cared or not.

"So, those are the Gorgons," Naomi said, in a deadpan voice that begged for sarcasm. "What exactly is it that happens when they open their eyes?"

"You die," Giles replied grimly. Yeah, that was probably the most succinct version of it. At least if he ever got in a contest about whose god could kick the others gods' ass, Bren was certain he would win quite easily.

Sylvia, still in gargoyle form, perched on the edge of the roof, looking down at the former battlefield. Bren thought she was surely too heavy for the roof and would crash inside, but somehow she didn't. Maybe the roof was stronger than he thought.

Rags got to his feet, using the shield for support, and his knees cracked explosively as he straightened up. It seemed painful, but he just looked tired, sweat making strands of his dirty blond hair stick to his forehead. "It's said they 'ave all of eternity in their vision."

Giles nodded. "Very poetic. What's it supposed to mean?"

Rags rolled his shoulders expansively, a disinterested shrug. "I dunno. Most of belief is jus' taken on faif." He was pretty sure he said _faith_, but it sounded like faif.

The Sisters approached Angel, who looked at them warily, like a couple of stray dogs. "We -"

"- had - "

" - a great - "

" - time. Let's -"

" - do it again - "

" - soon."

They then smiled, stereophonic grins of doom, and walked off into the night, so peppy they almost seemed to skip down the lane. After a moment, Bren found himself fighting another shudder. "I've said it before, but I'll keep saying it until it stops being true: creepy, creepy, creepy."

"I'm glad they never made it to Sunnydale," Giles said.

Angel shrugged. "They prefer big cities. More people to play with."

"Charming."

Helga started towards the house, and said to Sylvia, "Will you get down from there? We ain't done yet."

They all turned to look at her, Giles almost wobbling on his feet, so Bren reached out to steady him. Angel scowled at her, wiping blood from his face. "They're all dead if they didn't run when they had the chance. I'm not really interested in hunting them down."

"Neither am I. But Wolfram and Hart's involved in this, aren't they? Kill a million of their vampires and they wouldn't give a fuck. The thing about vamps is you can always make more. But this is an expensive house on an expensive piece of property, and there's probably lots of expensive shit inside. We burn this, and they will care; they will hurt. And we send a message to them that they can't possibly misunderstand. Not only will we kill all the soldiers they send after you, but we'll destroy their property as well, and it's a hit to the wallet that will make them pause. Even bad guys need cash."

There was an ice cold logic to that, one no one could dispute. Angel finally nodded and Hel continued walking towards the house as Sylvia took wing and flew off. She turned on the flamethrower and splashed flame over the front of the house, more than was honestly necessary to set it alight, and the thing began to burn brightly, catching as if it was made of flash paper and gasoline. For a while they stood there and watched it burn, the fire throwing their shadows and making them twist and turn like they were in pain.

It was a victory, but strangely it didn't feel much like it.

* * *

Bob had a clear idea what he wanted to do with Jeremy, but Logan wasn't sure it was bad enough considering what he'd done. But he had nothing equivalent to add beyond beating the shit out of this fucker. He just kept thinking about the body Faith found behind the gas station, and Lucia drowning in her own blood as she held his hand tightly, like he was the only thing holding her to this reality. They deserved better than this … but he still didn't know what. Nothing would bring them back, no matter what was done.

He stared down at him, his vision going blue, as he said in that god voice, "Your DNA is not in flux; you're a normal Human. You have no powers whatsoever." Jeremy sagged down to the ground, leaning against the back of the Navigator. It was like he was shrinking, becoming even more pathetic than before (if that was even possible). "But you're gonna remember what you did, Jeremy. You're gonna remember all the people you killed so you could live. You're no better than a vampire." He started to cry; no, blubber, actually. And Logan was pretty sure it was for himself, not other people, so he had to fight the urge to ram his head into the gas tank. Bob had better be right about the fallout. "Now that you're Human, the Organization will want nothing to do with you, but the cops are gonna catch up with you eventually. So you're gonna have to decide what to do with yourself, you miserable piece of shit. Time's up, bub. What are you gonna do?"

Jeremy continued to sob, and Logan turned away, disgusted by him. Everything he had done, all those people he had killed, and he hadn't done it because he was a psychopath - he'd done it because he was scared to die, no matter what his body kept telling him. He would've killed the world if it could have saved him, and he'd have never have spared a single thought to any of those he killed, because they didn't matter. He had to survive, and that's all there was to it. Logan almost would have preferred it if he were a psychopath; it would have made things simpler, cleaner. But he was just a selfish, cowardly fuck.

He finally noticed that he didn't feel good. He felt kind of … weak. Weak and hollowed out, like his insides had been scooped out clean, the power blasting through him in such a way that there was almost nothing left. _Okay, we're done, _Bob insisted. _Let's get you out of here._

_Fuck off. _But truth be told, he felt like he was going to pass out. He was a bit dizzy, and felt … weird. He couldn't think of a way to describe it, and every time thoughts approached, they seemed to fly away. He couldn't hold on to them, no matter how hard he tried.

_I think I've shagged you out. You're conscious on will alone. You really gotta teach me how to do that, mate. Very few people can will themselves through unconsciousness._

_Do you ever shut up? _The world was turning into liquid, growing fuzzy at the edges, while the pavement turned to gelatin beneath his feet. If he was somehow hanging on to consciousness like Bob had said, he could feel it sliding away beneath his fingers.

The world seemed to blink, and he found himself sitting in the back seat of the rental Jag again, making Faith and Marc start slightly, Faith uttering a small curse as she brought her fists up, as if ready to deck him in case he was an unwelcome guest. "Oh shit, you startled me," she said, letting out a sigh of relief. She then stared at him, like maybe the top of his scalp was missing. "Logan, you're bleeding from the ears."

Marc glanced in the mirror, and sucked in a sharp breath. "Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick, that looks nasty. Bro, you still got your brains in your head?"

"Ha bloody ha. 'M fine, it's over. We can go now." He let his head loll against the seat, letting the world shimmer and waver, mirages in the heat. Maybe he was a heat image, a figment of a delirious imagination.

"Just like that?" Faith asked, shocked. "What did you do to him?"

"Nothin'. Bob made him a normal Human, and gave him the choice of what he's gonna do with himself. He kinda thought that was best." He sighed, although it almost sounded like the breath was being pulled out of him. "I'm gonna hafta sleep for a while, but I'll be okay." He couldn't wait for confirmation, as his eyes closed of their own accord, and he heard vaguely as everything faded out around him, Faith asking, "Bob can do that?"

As if from down a long tunnel, he heard Marc reply, "He's Bob. He can do whatever the fuck he wants."

Logan felt like he was pitching forward, like maybe he wasn't as stable in the car as he thought, but then he realized he couldn't feel his body. He was just falling into an abyss, and it actually felt kind of enjoyable. But then again, it usually was; it was the landing that was the total bitch.

There wasn't one, though. Just falling, and then the sense that he was floating in a warm darkness.

No, not darkness.

He opened his eyes and found himself staring up at a slightly overcast sky, the light muted to a gentle blue that seemed to be the visual equivalent of Prozac. He was in a dead man's float in Bob's swimming pool, the water so still and warm he could have been hovering. He looked around, hardly moving his head, and didn't see Bob anywhere.

Bob was in the house. He knew that even before he heard the faint music of his stereo. Having had access to the power and some of Bob's memories, he thought he understood him a bit better now. For example, he was playing "Judith", the Perfect Circle song, which Bob had seemed to take on as his unofficial theme song. It was very curious since it was an extremely anti-organized religion song (if the singer's angry tone didn't convey that message, certainly him shouting "Fuck your god!" made it crystal clear), but now he could see why it appealed to Bob.

Bob really didn't care much for his fellow gods. Oh, he liked some - Degei and Ganesha instantly came to mind, and then there were most of his divine ex-wives - but for the most part he found them arrogant and unconscionable, and the people who worshipped them he was generally flummoxed by. (Hence why he supposedly liked Buddhists - they didn't worship any god.) If anybody dared to worship him, he'd probably hit them until they stopped. He had turned his back on the gods, and he didn't want to be associated with them if he could at all avoid it; he preferred being known as a Belial demon.

And all of this seemed a little bitter since the gods turned their backs on him first, but once they were willing to welcome him back into the fold, he rejected them all the same. The gods were his colleagues, and like many people, he didn't like most of his colleagues (and the feeling was apparently mutual). To say Bob was weird didn't even begin to cover it … and that's probably what made him the perfect avatar for him. They were both too weird and had pasts too checkered to fit in with anyone else. It was an accident he was his avatar, right?

Bob wasn't out here because he knew Logan was weak, and he also knew they'd probably argue. Bob didn't want to argue with him in his current state, probably because he didn't think it was fair. But didn't he know that an argument might keep his mind off thinking about all the threads of reality he'd have to pull to make it so Mariko didn't die? Bob couldn't bring back the dead, but he could warp reality to the point where some things might not happen. How much would he have to unravel to undo the series of events that led to her death? It would take a lot of unraveling, but how much exactly? Where did he start?

No, he couldn't think like that, and he mentally scolded himself for doing it, even though some part of his mind was continuing to attempt to calculate everything he'd need to do. He was tired, weak, and he needed to heal. So he cleared his mind as best he could and just concentrated on floating on the water, feeling lighter than he could ever remember feeling before. It was a strange kind of bliss; embracing the emptiness was an oddly soothing escape.

Everything else could wait. As soon as he was back up to strength, he'd kick Bob's ass, and figure out what the hell he was going to do with all this power.

9

In spite of claims that they didn't need a doctor, Bren and Giles ended up in a "demon" hospital anyways. (They occasionally treated Humans, but you had to know where they were, and most people didn't.) Bob was a financial contributor to it, so as soon as Helga came in with them, they were treated like royalty. Helga barked orders and they obeyed, and Bren was sitting on a table in an exam room, waiting for his throat wound to be seen to, when he had a horrible realization: this is where Wesley was taken to when he died. Rags had told him about it. Did Giles know - did Angel? Probably not. But Helga knew; she'd saved Wesley's corpse from being "recycled".

He was treated by a doctor who smelled Human and looked it. She used what was basically some kind of "glue" to seal the wound, and told him he was lucky; a few more millimeters and he'd have needed stitches. A couple of centimeters more in depth, and he probably would have died.

He got off easy, but Giles didn't. He'd had a deep sword wound in his arm, and he technically needed surgery but he wouldn't have it. Giles settled on the resident spellcasters (this hospital had witches on staff - it was partially funny, and partially ingenious) to heal his arm. As it was, healing spells required a lot of power, so they decided on a minor one to repair muscles and tendons, while he was given stitches and some intravenous fluids. Angel wasn't thrilled with it, but Giles was stubborn and didn't want to be out of action for any length of time.

Rags was worried about him and got him home, although he nagged a bit. He reminded him to drink lots of fluids - "not alcoholic; tha' doesn't count" - and then, once he was satisfied he was in for the night, "whoomped" out of there, probably to the Way Station for a drink.

Bren decided to take a shower, wash the blood off of him, but found himself too tired to stand up, so he took a bath instead. He tried not to think about anything, and he thought he did a pretty good job, hearing nothing but a white noise hum in his head.

Until the Wu's started arguing.

The Wu's were his neighbors at the very end of the hall, and their marriage could be best described as "tempestuous". They seemed to have about one big screaming fight a month, and they could keep it up at glass shattering volume for hours. Somebody usually called the cops on them, but this was a semi-bad neighborhood, and the cops rarely showed up. They just kept yelling at each other until they grew too hoarse, or someone stormed out, stomping down the hall all the way. He'd considered slipping the business card of Lionel Hutz, the demon lawyer who worked in Angel's building, under their door, or a pamphlet in favor of divorce, but he hadn't done it yet. Actually, if a couple managed to get along twenty nine days out of thirty, they were still doing better than he and Matt had managed.

(Matt - why the hell did he have to think about him now?)

Once out of the tub, he slipped on some sweat pants and stared at the slit in his throat in the mirror (you could barely see it now) for a few minutes, before suddenly catching himself thinking that he kind of looked like his mom, except for his red eyes.

He got a small, beer sized bottle of Bailey's Irish Crème out of the fridge - what Rags didn't know wouldn't hurt him - and turned on his stereo to attempted to drown out the Wu's. He put the CDs on shuffle and sat on the floor, pulling out a small cardboard box out from beneath his bed.

It was a box full of letters and handicrafts from his mother, Christmas cards and birthday cards (which, oddly enough, never came on time - she didn't seem to remember when his birthday was, and usually settled on it being in February, when it was in fact in July), sometimes cards for other holidays or for no reason at all. Why had he saved all this stuff? He never looked at, but then again, he couldn't throw them away either.

He started to sift through the letters, looking for a small clay thing that his mom had once made him (she said it was a cat, but it looked more like a frog), and he found himself singing along quietly with the CD that was fighting hard against the Wu's (and pretty much losing)." I built you a home in my heart, with rotten wood it decayed from the start. 'Cause you can't find nothing at all, if there was nothing there all along." The irony of what he was singing along with hit him after a moment, and he swigged down half the bottle of Bailey's, enjoying the rush that chugging down the sickly sweet stuff brought on, especially combined with the pain medication he got at the hospital.

He still felt guilty, still like a monster, but he got it now. He and his mother had a biological tie, but beyond that they'd never had much else. Oh, he knew she probably loved him in her way, just as he had loved her in a kind of half-hearted way, but they were never able to fully connect. The most major roadblock was the drugs - maybe she didn't really lose everything until she got into crack, but she'd never been a teetotaler; he knew at age three to avoid the bong water. But he was also half-demon … and she knew, didn't she? She'd never said a single word, but he had the feeling she'd known there was something wrong with him from the beginning. She'd tried her best to love him, he was sure she did, but he was a living reminder of a really bad choice. It was hard to love the stone around your neck. But couldn't she have ever mentioned it to him? A little "Hey, I think your dad was a demon"?

And now he was totally alone in the world. He'd always been alone, but he figured his mom was out there somewhere. But now he was truly alone. It was a cold, sick feeling.

A knock at the door startled him, nearly made him drop his bottle, and as he climbed up from the floor, he shouted somewhat belligerently, "Who is it?" He really wasn't in the mood for company right now, and if it was Rags again, he wasn't sure what he'd do.

After a moment's hesitation, he heard, "It's me, Kier."

Oh, so he'd survived the Gorgons, huh? He must have been one of the smart ones who split. He kicked the box back under his bed and grabbed a shirt, pulling it on hastily as he went to the door and peered out the peephole. Yes, it was just Kier alone, currently looking down towards the Wu's with a concerned expression, as if he thought fisticuffs or gunfire might break out at any second. It was possible, but there was no precedent for it.

He threw back the locks and opened the door, feeling completely pissed off with him. "How the hell did you find me?"

Kier looked at him with a clear eyed guilelessness that he just knew had to be an act. "You gave me your phone number, remember? I found your address in the online white pages."

He groaned at his own stupidity, and made a mental note not to give bad guys his personal info. You'd think that would have been obvious, but no … "So why are you here?"

He shrugged somewhat sheepishly. "I felt I owed you an explanation, considering what happened last night. Can I come in? I keep thinking that a body's gonna come flying from that apartment."

Bren glared at him, not sure if he should laugh at his audacity or hit him. "That's right, you can't come in unless I invite you. Isn't that a shame?"

Kier stepped forward and held out his hand. Bren took an automatic step back, and Kier waved his hand inside his apartment, his arm well beyond the door frame. "Um, actually no. I'm trying to be polite."

"What?" That didn't make sense! Vampires couldn't come into a person's place unless they were invited or the resident dead! Or - "Damn it! It's 'cause I'm half demon, right?"

He nodded, retracting his arm. "I think so, yeah. Sorry."

"Oh, fuck me!" he snapped angrily, turning and stalking into his apartment. As an afterthought, he said, "Yeah, fine, come in. But remember what I am."

It took Kier a moment to get it. "You mean demon hunter?"

"No, I mean lactose intolerant. What do you think?" He scowled at him, considering sitting down before reconsidering it. He remained standing, arms crossed over his chest, back to the wall so he could keep an eye on him. Kier came in, shutting the door gently and giving his place a visual once over. He suddenly remembered he hadn't done his dishes for a couple of days, and then he rolled his eyes at himself . This guy was a vampire, one who _set them up_ - who gave a fuck what he thought about his housekeeping?

Kier seemed to understand that he wasn't comfortable, so he stuck to the other side of the room, looking over the stuff there. He glanced at his bookshelf and then looked at the dvd case on top of his cable box. "Hey, Unleashed. I always meant to see that. How is it?"

"Okay. I got a couple of moves from it." Jet Li was the man. Was everyone absolutely positive he wasn't a mutant? 'Cause he had some seriously difficult moves. He could just imagine Jet and Logan in a pit against a hundred angry demons (or mutants - or both), and it just gave him a slight thrill of pleasure. Now _that_ would be something to watch, a total fighting clinic - they could probably make a billion dollars on pay-per-view.

"Huh?"

"Nothing. So say what you're gonna say, or attack me, whatever, I had a bad night and I'm in no mood to fuck around."

"Attack you? If I wanted you dead, I'd have let Raven kill you then dusted her."

That was a point, but he wasn't about to concede it. "Get to your point. I don't have all night, and I'm pretty sure you don't either."

He raised an eyebrow at that, giving him a smirk so sharp it looked painful. "You're that angry at me? I guess I don't blame you; I would be too. But you see, I'm kinda selfish, and I had real tunnel vision. I just wanted to get these guys so bad … it never occurred to me that there was a chance you guys wouldn't see it for what it was."

"A trap to kill us all? Yeah, we get those a lot. None of this excuses what you did. You couldn't have said 'Oh by the way, you know this is a trap and I'm a lying skank, right?'"

"Hey! Skank's a bit uncalled for …"

"You're not a vamp whore?"

He rolled his eyes and gave him a sour look. "Don't call me that. I didn't lie about the bite club, but I don't like being called a whore. No, it's not exactly high class work, but I do perform a sort of service, keeping those sad fetishists off the street and out of the way of moving trains. People like that don't feel alive unless they're staring big ugly death in the face. They get a thrill - a safe one - and go home happy. I don't apologize for that."

"And you get blood."

He conceded that with a small shrug. "Nobody dies, so that's in the plus column for me, right?"

Bren kept glaring at him. "Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"I've dated a lot of guys like you. You're totally arrogant, but you think you can somehow make it charming and cute. It's not; so knock it off before a stake you with a chopstick."

"Ouch. You don't mince words, do you?"

He sighed, almost too tired to banter with him. "Look, I'm not accepting your apology, but I'll make sure Angel doesn't hunt you down and kill you for it. Okay? Is that what you wanted?"

Kier gave him a tired, sad smile. "If I say what I want, you won't believe me."

He threw his hands up in the air in disbelief. "God, I'm so fucking tired of people playing games with me! Tell me and get the fuck out!"

"I wasn't lying that night at Syn, you know. I do like you. I got the sense you were as lost as I am."

"What the fuck d'ya mean lost?" He was trying to ingratiate himself with him, wasn't he? Why? He got what he wanted; the people who changed him and ruined his acting career were dead. So what else could he want? He didn't work for Wolfram and Hart, did he?

Kier shrugged a single shoulder and glanced down at the carpet, almost enbarrassed. It was a good act; he could have gone far as an actor. "Alone. You know, I was a poor Human, I know that now, but I think I'm a pretty good vampire. Which is sad, but what is worse is that I can't really stand other vampires. They all seem so self-involved, and so … one note. 'Wanna get someone to eat?' It's like they can't think of anything else. I want something … more."

"I think I should warn you at this point that I never bought that Anne Rice bullshit. There's no such thing as a noble vampire." Angel was just the exception that proved the rule, but he had a special set of circumstances. And the Sisters were probably influenced by Bob, although even in that case, they remained frighteningly evil - just evil on their side.

Kier nodded, finally looking him in the eye. "I'm not noble; I'm the opposite of noble. I'm just lonely, and I'd like to talk to someone who has more on their mind than their next meal."

This was trap number two. He knew it, and yet he couldn't quite figure out the end result of it. Was the point ingratiating himself in Angel's inner circle? To what end? Sabotage? His curiosity was really piqued now. Kier was probably someone's pawn, but whose? Although Wolfram and Hart was the prime suspects, there were more than a few other possibilities. There was one sure way to find out: play along. He was willing to take one for the team before, so why not now? Maybe he could finally be useful for something other than taking messages. (And maybe he could get him mind off of everything else …) He scoffed, still playing the skeptical angle. "That's very nice. Would you like some violin accompaniment?"

He shook his head, presumably in disappointment. "Why don't I come back some other time? Maybe when you're less pissed off at me."

Kier started walking back towards the door, but Bren had made up his mind. This guy was working for someone, and he was going to find out who, and why on earth they decided to target him as the weak link. (Because he was? No, he wasn't, but he could see how some people might think that.) The thought that someone could be angling to take advantage of his obvious loneliness infuriated him, but the flush of heat through his system felt welcoming. He had something to do now besides feel sorry for himself.

He grabbed Kier by the arm and threw him against the wall. Kier managed to turn and hit the wall back first, but he stared at him with a mixture of incredulousness and curiosity. "What the fuck was that for?"

"So you want me, huh? Prove it." he told him, and kissed him hard, a move that would have threatened to suffocate someone … except he was a vampire and didn't need to breathe. He was ice cold, but his icy hands on his body made goosebumps rise on his skin as Kier kissed him back just as hard - oh yeah, he was a good actor - and tangled his fingers in his still damp hair.

If Kier wanted to play this game, so be it. He could use him to forget, to kill the pain, then stake the bastard as soon as he found out who he was working for and to what purpose.

He was a demon, after all. There was no reason he couldn't be as ruthless as the rest of them.

* * *

To Be Continued …. 


End file.
